iPod PC management

Hi to everyone,

I got a 40GB iPod for Christmas from my wife and love it. I use it with an iTrip to listen to my music on the way to work, when I'm cooking and to chill out with after a long day. I have no issues with the unit but am slightly confused.

I currently have around 1,000 songs on it and these are also sat on my computer. In time I imagine that my PC's performance will drop because of the number of songs on it. From reading the posts on here I can get the idea that the iPod forms more of a means of carrying the music rather than just storing it, unlike some other MP3 players, but surely there must be a way to have the iPod as the means of storing the music so that when you connect it to a PC it shows you what songs are on it.

I appreciate that this is probably a very stupid question and I apologise if it already appears on these pages but I did look first but couldn't see it. Please bear in mind that I'm very new to this and don't really know much about downloaded and stored music. I would really welcome any information from you guys and girls about this and also if anyone has any other tips or tricks with iPods.

Many thanks.

Tim

 

Tim,

To the best of my knowledge having 1000 or even 1,000,000 songs wont afect the performance of your computer as long as you have a big enough hard drive.

Still, you can put all your songs on your ipod and take them off your pc if you want. when u connect your ipod to your pc it will let you play the songs on it through itunes. Also there is software like ipodAgent that will allow you to take the songs back off the ipod and put them on your computer if you want. I would recommend keeping a direct backup though on dvd or the computer incase something happens to your ipod and you lose your music collection!!!

 

or you could get an external hard drive and keep all your music on there - that's waht I do

 

Get to Aldi and buy a 149GB external HD for £70.

 

You could buy an internal one, they are cheaper and are easy to fit!!

 

Tim, for all your iPod related tips 'n' tricks, you could do worse than try:
http://www.ipodlounge.com/

 

hughesy, internal might be cheaper, but i'm not sure they're easier to fit. u just plug an external into a usb port - job done.

 

true, not easier to fit, but pretty simple!! Even for people who don't have much computer experience!!

have a look at this site it has tips on how to install stuff into computers

 

Apple actually went as close as they dared to letting you do what you want with your music, and even ran a "rip, mix, burn" ad campaign for itunes. No other large company came so close to giving consumers what they wanted, for fear of litigation. That was one important component of putting Apple where they are in the market.

The other side of this is that they have to try hard to prevent you copying your music from PC to PC via iPod.

Your music is all on the ipod in normal files that you can copy. They're just invisible files (set not to show up in file browsers). But you can view and copy them if you enable viewing of "invisible" files, or use a command-line copy command. itunes won't help you. But once you've copied them, itunes is happy to recatalogue.

I know this because I accidentally deleted all my music, and transferred everything back from my ipod. (I don't have any DRMed music).

 

I have a question related to storing all my musinc on i tunes to a USB HDD.

I keep trying to set I tunes to read the music files from the USB hard drive so I can delete I tunes from my main HDD, but it wont let me. Even if I set it to drive D insted of C it still wont read the files in drive D and keeps reverting to drive C. I even tried uninstaling i tunes and re instaling on to drive D but it still keeps making a new "my music" folder and reading from that folder.

How can I change it so that I tunes reads only from drive D and leaves drive C completely alone?

 

I'm afraid I can't answer definitively for MS Windows users, but I suspect it's similar to Mac. In which case:

There are at least two things you can do.

1. uncheck "copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library". Then you can add everything on your USB drive to your iTunes library without moving it to your C drive.

2. move the music folder to your USB drive and replace the original folder with an alias to the new one.

with method 1, newly imported CD's and downloads will still go to drive C
with method 2, all your music files should end up on the USB drive

For expert help, try Apple's own discussion boards (under support:discussions on the apple.com web site). There's a special area for iTunes for Windows.

I hope it's a USB2 drive or life could become tedious.

I don't know that it's possible to make iTunes completely ignore drive C if that's your system drive. At the very least it's going to read an alias off it.

 

this may help (from Apple discussion boards, but I don't think I can link to it):

If your hard drive is nearly full after loading all your music into iTunes or if you just want to move all those music files to another hard drive on your system, here's the way to make the change and save all your playlists, ratings, and play history.

iTunes Preferences -> Advanced tab; Keep Music Folder organized ... should be enabled.

iTunes Preferences -> Advanced tab, set the library location to some folder on the new drive; preferably a new empty folder

iTunes Advanced menu -> Consolidate Library... This step copies all the files in iTunes' library to the new location.**It also maintains your ratings and playlists.

if it finishes properly, manually delete the original files through Windows Explorer.**iTunes won't Move the files, only copy them to the new location.

If you see a file called iTunes 4 Music Library.itl in the old area - leave it alone.**It continues to live in that location despite the change to the Library location.

 

Be really careful!
I copied my music from C: to D:, updated the location of the library to D: then chose consolidate library. Ended up with duplicates of everything and filled the hard drive - doh!
Also do not under any circumstances stop a library consolidation - I ended up with loads of horribly fragmented duplicates that I took ages to remove as neither Windows nor iTunes were happy about deleting the corrupt files.

Move the library at your peril!

 

Thanks for the assistance, i was finally able to move my library to my USB(2) HDD and every new album i instal now goes to drive D insteas of C.
Freed up lots of space for games!

By the way, why doesnt windows have a drive "B"?