iHuh?

[bluegargantua]

OK,

So I got an iPod. It's pretty nice. I hook it to my mac, buy a couple of albums, very nice.

I go to work where I've ripped a ton of CDs to MP3 so I can listen to them. I figure I'll just download all the MP3s to the iPod and we're good to go.

1.) iPods come formatted for Macs, not PCs. I didn't really want to reformat it, I just wanted to move some MP3s on it. Luckily, I grab this utility called XPlay3 that lets me look into the iPod. I transfer over all my files and everything is hey presto good.

2.) I come home and hook my iPod up to my Mac. It syncs up and all my MP3s are gone. What the hell? How do I get it to stop overwriting the MP3s? Is there a way I can transfer the MP3s off the iPod and into the Mac?

Thanks
Tom

Comments

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

You probably have iTunes configured to automatically update your iPod when you plug it in. It's nuking anything on your iPod that's not in your iTunes library. Change your iTunes config to manually update your iPod. You'll have to click and drag new tracks onto the iPod, but it shouldn't remove anything that's already there. You'll need to have the iPod plugged in to access the iPod menu in iTunes.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Mm, kind of what mazianni said and kind of not. iPods are supposed to be one-way-- you put stuff on them, period. So you'd need to get the mp3z onto a single system and sync your iPod to that.

There may be other utilities out there, but that's what iTunes expects... You may want to turn off auto-sync anyway, though.

[pfloyd.livejournal.com]

Well... you could always load up iTunes at work, and let it search for your MP3s and import them into the library... that would solve that issue. Better still -- convert them to AAC (iTunes native format), and I think you can save yourself some space. Converting them to a lower freq (64 is a good number) also saves space and doesn't lose sound quality.

[sben.livejournal.com]

As noted above, that's the way it works; you can normally only sync from a computer to the iPod, and then only from a single computer (syncing from a different computer erases the stuff that came from the first one). Probably one of the ways Apple needs to make the music industry happy.

I haven't used it myself, but I've heard that xPod (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12731) works well for what it sounds like you want to do.

[sben.livejournal.com]

Examining xPod little further, it looks a bit old, so it may or may not work with more modern iPods. If it doesn't, check out iLounge's software page (http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/software/osx/), which lists several apps claiming to do what you want.