I have a 30 GB iPod. I downloaded an album from the iTunes store yesterday, tried to get it to go to the iPod, ended up choosing the wrong sync option, deleted everything including playlists and had to put it all back on. Now, when I look at the songs on the iPod in iTunes, they’re greyed out so I can’t change anything or move the songs to a playlist, and if I try to change the sync option back to “do not sync”, I get a warning that I will lose everything.
I need to be able to change song names and move songs and such.
I am not great with my Ipod, but I knwo if the songs are greyed out then they are not necessarily in “your Library” and may only be on your Ipod and therefore can’t be moved around and stuff.
You might have to Sync it and start again. I know Ipods can only be Synced to one computer.
It just did it on its own. The songs are in my library; I don’t delete them once they’re on the iPod. Besides, I had stuff on my iPod that wasn’t in my library, and that wasn’t greyed out.
related question if i may. My pc is getting a bit full, and i see no value in having songs on both my Ipod & my pc. What settings do I need, to allow me to delete music from the pc whilst not having the deletions sync off the iPod?
You have set your iPod to automatically update. When it’s set like that you can only sync with certian designated playlists, you can’t manually drag and drop songs.
To go back to drag and drop, change your sync options to “update manually”.
To be square about it, this is not what the iPod is designed for, though you’re far from the first person to want to do this.
The iPod is meant as a player, not a storage unit. The value in having your music on both your player and your PC is that your player can simply lose them (if it were damaged, stolen, or becomes corrupt).
Having your music readily available on our PC just makes sense (I won’t harp on the fact that you should even have removable media backups of your music).
If you’re getting low on space you can convert MP3s to AACs, or even look into new storage space (disks are dirt cheap these days).
I missed my edit window because I got called away… here’s my more verbose version:
You have set your iPod to automatically update (you should see a small black lock icon on your iPods sons list too).
When it’s set like that you can only sync with certian designated playlists, you can’t manually drag and drop songs.
When set to automatically update it works like this:
You pick 1, 2, 3 or however many playlists you want to appear on your iPod and under the “Music” tab in iTunes, check “sync the following playlists” and check-off the ones you want.
Add & delete songs from these playlists in iTunes, then click “sync iPod” to apply any changes to the iPod.
You can’t both manually drag & drop songs one at a time if you’re set to automatically update.
To go back to drag and drop, change your sync options to “update manually”. All your songs will become active again and you’ll be able to manually drag and drop anything to and from the iPod.
I don’t have any problem with this. I don’t have enough room on my computer for all of my videos so I let them sync to my iPod as normal, then drag them from my mac to my storage drive. The videos are still on my iPod, but they are no longer on my mac.
An iPod is an external drive, with player software on it, so there’s little problem with keeping stuff on it that’s not on the computer. Though Apple does make it a bit more complicated than it needs to be.
First thing to do is check the ‘manually manage music’ checkbox in iPod options (in iTunes).
Load the songs using iTunes, and remove them from your iTunes library, confirming (if asked) that you wish to delete the songs as well. If the songs aren’t copy-protected, or your computer is authorized for the iPod, you’ll still be able to play them on the computer when you plug the iPod in. What you can’t do in iTunes is load them back onto the computer, so you should have a backup elsewhere.
Or you can also use another utility that will make the stuff in the iPod_Control directory (which is where the songs iTunes puts on are stored) visible with proper filenames in the file manager . On Macs, iPodDisk is one option; on Windows there are probably several, but I’ve used Anapod Explorer in the past.
You can also simply store the songs on the iPod, using your systems file manager (once the ‘manually manage’ box is checked). In this case, they won’t be playable on the iPod, so this is more of a backup option.
Not to state the obvious, but there is a HUGE problem with this method. The external drive in question is physically very small, valuable, not waterproof, etc. If, like most users, you have spent hours ripping CDs to put on the iPod, you’re not going to be happy when the HDD eventually dies or the iPod itself is lost, broken, or stolen and you do not have a backup of those files.
If you are running low on drive space, try using treesize, double killer and dupdetector and get rid of unnecessary files taking up HDD space before you do something stupid with your music library.
