two ipods, one PC?

[gordy]

First time poster from Scotland here, but I've been lurking for months and learned just about everything I ever needed to know about my ipod from everyone else's research and occasional heartaches - so thanks, everyone!

Hopefully this is in the right forum and hopefully someone can answer this question for me. Please bear with me, since I'm a technical cretin.

I have a 30g 3g pod and use MMJB (without ANY problems) on my laptop, which runs Windows XP home edition. I currently have around 4000 tunes in the library, which is obviously eating away at my memory.

But I've keptthem on there for the moment because a friend of mine who lives in Hungary and is a couple of thousand miles away from his music collection has just bought a 40gig pod.
We both have similar taste in music so to save him having to go through the weeks of torture ripping all his CDs from scratch, can I just take his pod when he comes home for Christmas, drop it into my dock, and do a sync with my library?

Will his pod be recognised by my computer? And if it is, will it have any effect on my pod? Like, will it displace it or anything? or because it's been initialised on another machine, will mine simply fail to see it?

He uses exactly the same laptop as me, same software and has installed everything to the same set-up.

As far as I can make out from browsing other threads, this should work, but I just worry that having been problem free with my pod since I got it in September, it's all going to go horribly wrong.

Can any of you people with the knowledge put my mind at rest and save my mate hour after painful hour throwing CDs in and out of his computer?

Thanks in advance for any advice

[Mountain Man]

First of all, it's wrong to steal music, so transferring any music that your friend doesn't personally own to his iPod is immoral.

That said, I'm not sure what kind of rudimentary copy protection is built into Musicmatch or iTunes. I believe they're configured to only recognize a single iPod, but I could be mistaken. However, third party software like Redchair's XPlay (commercial) or Ephpod (free if used with Winows formatted iPods) don't really care one way or the other and will happily transfer music to whatever iPod happens to be hooked up to the computer.

[gordy]

okay, maybe I didn't explain the circumstances well enough there, as far as the "immoral" stuff goes.

Most of the CDs I own, he also owns. Sadly for him though, they're in his house in Warrington in England, a place he's unlikely to see for another six months or so due to his work commitments in Europe. A long time to go without your music I'm sure you'll agree. I'm just trying to help a man out.

But like I say, it was really the technical 'can I, can't I?' rather than the ethical 'should I, shouldn't I?'' I was interested in.

thanks anyway, MM

[Mountain Man]

I understand, which is why I answered your technical question. However, I feel the ethical issue should not be ignored.

[BritishBoy666]

don't quote me on this, but it THINK musicmatch will detect your friends iPod as a new portable device and then just open the portable device window and just select it and press sync. i use iTunes which definetly works with mulitple iPods. BTW the 'ethical issue' is rubbish, hes only trying to help out a mate.

[Mountain Man]

I never accused him of doing anything immoral. I merely pointed out a potential ethical conflict. That is all. If you notice, I did provide a solution to his technical problem. If I had suspected that he was planning on dumping a bunch of pirated files to his friend's iPod then I would have responded differently.

[gordy]

BB666,
thanks for taking the time to reply. I kind of thought (or maybe just hoped!) that might be the case - I just don't want it to displace my own in the heart of my computer!

The iTunes thing is another temptation but one which I have so far avoided, simply because nothing has gone wrong for me with MMJB. I did download it but reading on here that as soon as you install it, it disables MMJB, I ran a mile.

I'll give it a go, anyway, and if it works out, I'll let you know.

Obviously in the meantime if anyonecan give me a definitive "yes, it works" I'd still appreciate it.

PS. with that 666 in your moniker, can you be trusted???!!!

[sberger]

it's a good question because i just upgraded from a 10g to 30g. will i have to reconfigure the new one, or can i just start dumping ripped cd's from my library on to it without any other steps?

[gordy]

Nice MC5 sig line there!

One thing I did try when my friend first got his was just to pop it in there an see if you could do exactly that but although the computer recognised it was there, and the 'do not disconnect' sign came up, it didn't allow you to do anything with it.

I assume now that he's configured it on his own computer, that should change.

Cheers again for any help

[Mountain Man]

If his iPod was formatted for Apple (which is how they come) then Windows wouldn't know what to do with it, which is why you couldn't access it.

[deftdrummer1]

stealing music is perfectly normal and ethical. Why? cause the industry's been stealing money from us for years. Now were simply returning the favor, ...the only way we know how

[sberger]

forget about the consumer...look at what they have done to the majority of artists. that's the funny thing about all this stuff. the labels crying about how it's unethical to steal from the artists when they've been doing it since the beginning of time. i don't have as much a problem with bands like metallica whining about file sharing as stealing (although realistically they're pretty lame also) as much as i do universal, wea, etc.