One thing that annoys me about the iPod

[blike]

The one thing that annoys the heck out of me with my iPod is the fact that you can't pull songs from the iPod back to your hard drive. I just realized this. Now I've got to go hunt down some free software to do it for me. Any suggestions?

[Insane]

You can, but you have to manually go into the iPod and copy the songs. There is a program to do it for sure.

[swansont]

The idea, of course, is that the songs are already on your hard drive. The restriction makes it marginally harder to steal music.

[mmalluck]

huh? Sounds like iTunes crippling to me. Stuff like that makes me angry.

 

I use the winamp ipod plugin (ml_ipod) . You can dump whatever song you want back out onto your hard drive. It'll even parse the names into whatever you want. I really like that.

 

If you use winamp to sync your ipod, you can not use iTunes. iTunes is a bastard and a poorly coded bastard at that. If it sees that another computer/program has modified your library, it goes beserk, wipes the ipod, and reloads all the songs it thinks should be there. If you don't use iTunes to sync the ipod automaticly, you're okay.

 

The best way to fix that is to turn off the autostart feature for iTunes. No iTunes. No problem.

[blike]

The idea, of course, is that the songs are already on your hard drive. The restriction makes it marginally harder to steal music.

Understandable, but what about us poor folk who got a new computer and don't feel like ripping 100 cds again :/

[husmusen]

Which I suppose is a good example of why Big Business trying to

tell you how you can use and listen to your music is as annoying as

Big Government trying to tell you how you can use and listen to music.

 

Cheers.

[swansont]

Understandable, but what about us poor folk who got a new computer and don't feel like ripping 100 cds again :/

 

Can't you transfer from one computer to the other? That's what I've done. Several times, in fact. I have my music collection on my work computer, transferred from my old work computer, and used that to copy onto my home computer and laptop. I also have a firewire disk with everything backed up.

 

You could do it with the iPod in "disk mode" where part of the drive just becomes a firewire disk, but you have to separately copy the songs as files.

[Dave]

Use ephPod. When I moved to university, I transferred all of my music over from my ancient iMac to a new PC. I got the iPod out, made sure it was sync'd with the iMac, plugged it into the PC and then booted up ephPod. Transferred ~10gb music over in about 15 minutes or so.

[H2SO4]

Arent you supposed to be able to use an ipod as an external hard drive? If you can do this, why cant you pull songs from it?It seems kinda wierd.

[swansont]

Arent you supposed to be able to use an ipod as an external hard drive? If you can do this, why cant you pull songs from it?It seems kinda wierd.

 

You can store songs and play them and/or use it as an external drive. You can't do both at the sime time with the same files. You can store a song in the player and at the same time store a file of the same song on an external drive partition.

[-Demosthenes-]

Yeah, my shuffle will completely format if it is plugged into any other computer except the "home" computer. And it charges in the USB port too, so I can't even charge it in another computer.

 

I've noticed that other mp3 players won'yt let you copy songs back off of it either.

[mmalluck]

Just turn off Autosync and you can plug your player into any computer without worry. It sucks that you can't turn it off on the ipod shuffle. They don't advertise that fact, but that's the number one reason I didn't get the shuffle and went for a 20gig one instead.

 

Autosync is the "feature" included to make the RIAA happy.

[-Demosthenes-]

So this autosync is in the player not the solfware? Would it still do it if the other computer didn't have Itunes?

[fuhrerkeebs]

Understandable, but what about us poor folk who got a new computer and don't feel like ripping 100 cds again :/

 

I copied all of my songs from my computer to my bro's computer over our network, and then loaded them all onto the new computer from there.

[c dawg]

My friend put 3700 songs on my Ipod and I want to put them on my hard drive as well just in case anything happens. I never tried it yet but I guess I will have to download one of theose programs as well.

Something I don't like is the new 4G and mini click wheel. I have a 3G and I find them more easier to use.

[mmalluck]

So this autosync is in the player not the solfware? Would it still do it if the other computer didn't have Itunes?

 

No, it's part of the software and has to be turned off on every computer you want to plug your ipod into. This in fact makes things suck more because you can't turn off autosync until an ipod is connected to the computer. As soon as you connect up your ipod to turn off autosync *poof!* away goes your stuff.

 

 

Again, I'd go with a different ipod mannager like the winamp plugin, ml_pod, because it doesn't have any of the engineered limitations that iTunes does.

[Annemarie]

Another annoying this about the ipod

 

This is really annoying! I have a number of spoken word files, inclding the Feynmann lectures, frnech lessons and other things that I enjoy listening to. Even though there is an audio book section, I cannot find a way to transfer these files to that section, which means that they are treated by the ipod as normal song files, so when I'm listening to all 2,000 of my tracks, very now and then I get the booming voice of Richard Feynmann and jump up in alarm, before skipping to the next song. Does anyone know a way to transfer these files out of the song respoitory to the audio books one?

[mmalluck]

Here's a trick to get them out of your playlist (i used this same trick to make sure none of the annoying tracks that program the iTrip came up on my playlist).

 

Take your spoken word files and re-encode them as *.m4a files using iTunes. (Change your import settings to use "Apples lossless Encoder" and then import all your spoken word files).

 

Next change the extentions on all your newly encoded files to *.m4b. Transfer them to your Ipod. The files will now show up on your audiobooks section and will be left out of the normally generated playlist. Hope that helps.

[swansont]

Another annoying this about the ipod

 

This is really annoying! I have a number of spoken word files' date=' inclding the Feynmann lectures, frnech lessons and other things that I enjoy listening to. Even though there is an audio book section, I cannot find a way to transfer these files to that section, which means that they are treated by the ipod as normal song files, so when I'm listening to all 2,000 of my tracks, very now and then I get the booming voice of Richard Feynmann and jump up in alarm, before skipping to the next song. Does anyone know a way to transfer these files out of the song respoitory to the audio books one?[/quote']

 

 

In iTunes you can choose the genre of the files, and create playlists (regular playlists, in which you manually add songs, or smart playlists, which use selection criteria). Make sure you make all of those file "spoken word' (or make up a custom genre) and the create playlists that include or exclude those files.

 

edit: it sounds like you are just listening to your library listing. There's a lot more you can do than that. is this a regular iPod, or a shuffle?