iPod Help - Frequently Asked Questions / Help
Managing Music
Battery
Importing Music Other
I can't get Windows to 'see' my iPod! There used to be two ways to connect the iPod to your PC – USB and Firewire. Since the 5th Generation (iPod Video) came out, you can now only use USB to connect and sync. If you have a 4th generation iPod or earlier - I would recommend using Firewire to connect, with a 5th Generation iPod onwards - use USB. If you are using a USB connection with an older iPod though, be aware that they are more susceptible to device conflicts. e.g. if you sometimes connect a digital camera to your PC via USB that camera may be assigned a drive letter that will be reassigned to the iPod – your PC will then get very confused about what is where. This often results in a “Cannot mount iPod” type message. Another old 'recognition' problem is if you do not boot from the C: drive on your PC – the iPod will then be assigned this drive letter and will then not work properly. To fix - reassign the iPod in Windows Disk Manager to a 'higher' letter. In any case of your computer not recognising your iPod, you should always try a hard reset on it. How can I delete songs off my hard drive but keep them on my iPod? This is not a good idea. The iPod was not designed to act as a backup for your music. iTunes is where you store your music on computer, and your iPod is in effect just a 'mirror' of what is on iTunes. If you do delete the music off of your computer and keep it on your iPod, you will lose all your music if ever there is a problem with your iPod - you could drop it, lost it, or have it stolen. I would recommend never just keeping your music collection on your iPod. oYour best bet is to buy more hard drive space, as disk drives are good value for money. You should also strongly consider backing up your music onto writeable media, like DVD-R (especially as from iTunes 7 onwards, there is now a built in menu function to do this). At the very least you should backup the music that you can't rip in again from physical CD - i.e. tracks that you have downloaded from the iTunes store. However, if you really want to do this (delete the songs off of your hard disk, and just keep them on the iPod), then change your iPod to sync 'manually' rather than automatically and once you've transferred music to your iPod, you could delete it out of iTunes. For a Windows PC, I have seen IPodAgent, iPodRip or CopyPod program - all which work really well. Similar programs exist for the Mac too. All three of theose programes will require you to have an installation of the Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website here. As the iPod is - in essence - just a hard drive you can use Windows Explorer to copy the music files as well. There are two problems with this though - first, the folder for the music is hidden (so you need to turn on "Show hidden and system files and folders" in Windows explorer), second - because when iTunes transfers the files over to the iPod it uses its own numbering system for naming the files, they won't make much sense to you when on your hard drive. This isn't a huge issue with either iTunes or the iPod, since the tags inside the files are what really matters (that's where information about the song title, artist, and album are stored), but if you are the sort that likes to know what your files are by looking at them, it could be a bother. Where are the music files located on my iPod?
Once you've done all that, open up the drive letter that has been assigned to your iPod, and there'll be a whole bunch of folders on your iPod. There is a hidden one called 'iPod_Control', within that is another hidden folder called 'Music', and within that are 50 hidden folder labellled 'F0' through to 'F50' which contain files that are the actual music.
Can I use an iPod with Windows 98 or Windows ME? Officially, only Windows 2000, XP and Vista are supported by Apple. Whilst it is possible to use a iPod with Windows ME and Windows 98SE, it won’t be a good experience - and you will need to get third party software (as you can't use iTunes). If you really want to do this thought, then you should either seek help from the iPodlounge forums, or have a look at this dedicated page here which describes a method of getting an iPod to work in earlier versions of Windows. How do I deal with more music on my hard drive than fits on my iPod? Change your iPod options to “Sync selected playlists” and then create playlists of the music you want to sync. If you've got an iPod shuffle, this will happen automatically as the space of a shuffle is nearly always smaller than the amount of music that you'll have on your computer!
Ah! A good question. This used to be an issue with the first and second generation of iPods, but with later generations the battery life has been improved, and it is no longer an issue. There is though the www.ipodbatteryfaq.com website which answers all of your questions and more about this topic - but again, only relevant to 1st, 2nd and possibly 3rd generation iPods. There is also the now notorious 'iPods Dirty Secret' website, where two guys made a video who were annoyed with the initial battery life of the first generation iPods. (Needs Quicktime to view the video clip). Can I use my iPod on more than one computer or have more than one iPod using the same computer? In short - no! Think about it logically, your iPod can only automatically be a 'mirror' of one installation of iTunes, and can't have on it two lots of music from two different computers. The iPod was - as a general rule - only designed to sync music with one computer, but a little known fact is that you CAN have multiple iPod synceds to one version of iTunes. e.g. if two people in one household had one computer, but they owned an iPod each, plugging each of their respective iPod's and syncing it to iTunes causes no issues whatsoever and you are allowed to do this. You can either have the two (or more) people syncing up to the SAME iTunes installation, or ...if you have two (or more) people in a household with an iPod each, just create seperate logins in Windows, and you will also have seperate installations of iTunes, and seperate librarys which will be synced seperately. If you really DO want to try and sync one iPod between more than one computer though, you have to put iTunes into manual mode and then drag and drop the music as required. This will work, but is laborious, probably illegal, you'll get out of sync and maybe forget which music is where. There are also third party pieces of software out there on the internet which do allow you to do this (e.g iPodControl) but I couldn't possibly recommend it ... iTunes won't rip my CD's properly iTunes can have some problems with certain CD drives. You should post your question in the iTunes forum where there are lots of solutions for the various issues. Usually though, an update of your firmware for your CD/DVD drive is all that is needed. I'm having trouble getting XP with Service Pack 2 working with my firewire If you have installed Windows XP SP2, and then find that your iPod now
won't connect via the Firewire port which work before you installed SP2,
then you can try the following (apart from uninstalling SP2). If I uninstall and reinstall iTunes, will I have to import all my music again? No you won't! This is a common question, and something that puts people off fiddling with iTunes. There are two files which iTunes uses to keep track of your music - 'iTunes Music Library.xml' (which some people argue - is not in true XML format) and 'iTunes 4 Music Library.itl'. By default these two files are stored in your 'My Music\iTunes' folder. These are two database files which do not get deleted if you uninstall iTunes, so you uninstall the program, or when you upgrade it to a new version, it picks up on these two files and still knows whereabouts on your hard drive all your music is. iTunes never does anything with the AAC or MP3 files that it plays, it merely has pointers with them to 'know' where they are on your computer. You can safely uninstall iTunes, and it won't delete or do anything else with the actual music files on your disk. In all instances, flick the hold switch on and off. Then do a hard reset. If you wish to enter either diagnostic mode or disk mode, then press that combination of button when the apple logo appears when it starts up again after the reset. To reset the iPhone, press and hold both the sleep/wake button (on top of the iPhone) and the Home button (centered below the screen) for a few seconds. When you see the Apple logo, you can let go and the iPhone will start back up. A hard reset it the thing to do if your iPod ever 'hangs' (crashes). You might have to do this once in a while. Try not to be tempted to go into the diagnostic mode or disk mode unless you have a specific reason for doing so. (And if you're now saying "Like what - what specific reason?" then you don't have a reason to do it!)
:: iPod Page
|
|
The
music on your iPod is stored in the 'Music' folder, which is hidden. To
see them, you must first enable your iPod for 'disk use' - an option in
iTunes, and then from any Windows Explorer window make sure that you can
see hidden files and folders. ( Tools | Folder Options | View | Show hidden
files and folders )
iPhone
Fourth
Generation (iPod Photo)
