Out of the iPOD business

[mcman]

Hope I'm in the correct forum. Today I reluctanly returned my 40Gb iPOD to Best Buy and got my money back or shall I say a credit. With 6,428 mp3 files which I had diligently put on it in the course of the month I've had it, I have to report that the POD would selectively play some and not others. Explanation: I have collected mp3 files on CDs for some years now and thought the iPOD would be ideal for putting these files in one location. I dearly loved the iPOD. I had the POD set to manual and "dragged and dropped" the files from the CDs to the iTUNES library and then to the POD. It SAYS I CAN DO THIS. So some play and other don't. There is just an ! mark out beside the songs in iTUNES and on the POD the songs are just skipped. They all play on the CDs. So what's up? From the error log generated from iPOD Agent I get an error message saying " Could not find file "H:\iPOD_Control\Music\F32 or 31 or wherever is supposedly resides on the POD\Song Name. Funny thing, they all play on the CDs.

So the guy says, "Hey, we'll just give you another one." I say, "Hey I don't want another one. I want al of my 6,428 songs which took me a month to drag to the POD and edit all the titles and artists names, etc. etc. He says, "We can't be responsible for your songs." I agreed. But what if it happens again a month from now or a year from now. My music is IMPORTANT to me.

Forgive me for ranting and raving. The iPOD is a fabulous machine but it didn't work for me. Software problem?? Bad iPOD?? Can't say. What I can say is that I will not spend precious time putting songs on it and not knowing if they will play tomorrow or not. Will I ever buy another iPOD? Maybe!! But for now I'm just going to mix another drink because I'm sick and somebody somethwhere will have all my music if they're smart enough to figure out the problem. Thanks for letting me vent.

[GadgetGuru72]

The "!" next to the song title in the iTunes library means that iTunes cannot locate the file. Therefore, when you tried to drag the file to your iPod, you weren't really doing anything at all. Neither iTunes nor your iPod are to blame for this. You have to actually transfer the MP3 files to the iTunes library folder. Once they reside on your computer, you can then transfer them to your iPod.

You returned your iPod in haste without taking the time to figure out what you were doing.

Also, if your music was on CDs, you haven't lost anything assuming you didn't throw the CDs away. If you did, again, that's your fault. Why on earth would you throw away your backups?

[mcman]

I did drag them to the iTUNES library first and then to the iPOD. And I do have all the songs backed up on CDs. It's the time to restore all of them from the CDs that I found difficult to deal with. And no, I didn't keep them on my harddrive. I see no reason to clutter my harddrive with 20-40Gb of songs when CDs do quite well as a backup. Thanks for you input.

[mcman]

It would appear that if you were dragging and dropping a file from a CD and didn't have "Copy files to iTUNES music folder when adding to library" checked under the Advanced selection in iTUNES that you would be playing the song directly from the CD and it would never go on your harddrive. Maybe this little gizmo is just to advanced for a finite mind such as mine to understand. Thanks again!!!

[jhollington]

That is essentially correct... If "Copy Files to Library" is not turned on, then iTunes creates a link to the track on your CD. While that still shouldn't prevent you from transferring the track to your iPod, you would have to do it while the CD is still inserted in the drive, otherwise the tracks are basically "missing" when iTunes goes to look for them to transfer them to the iPod.

[mcman]

I would think it would be obvious that you must have each respective CD inserted in the drive (which I did, 100% of the time) since the path that iTUNES would have to take would be to the CD drive in order to copy it to the iPOD. Where else would it look if the file was not resident on your harddrive?? This is getting very interesting and I wish someone could prove to me that I am at fault because nothing would please me more than to go get another POD. I thank everyone for there input.

[jhollington]

Well, to be fair I'm actually not saying that you're at fault. It's entirely possible that there's a bug in iTunes that makes it not want to work with MP3s directly from a CD.

I haven't tried it personally, but you've actually brought up an interesting scenario. I'll have to try it later and see what happens....

[mcman]

Is there something peculiar to mp3 files and iTUNES/iPOD?? I don't know. You raise an interesting point also. I had some .aac files that fell into the same category, not playing, that is. So perhaps it will always remain a mystery. I suspect that Apple would prefer that you don't use the POD as just a stand alone harddrive and would like you to let it update automatically thus keeping 40 GB of information on you computers harddrive. I've got the space to do this, though I see no legitimate reason for it. Some people don't have that much space to devote to music. Anyway, I still think it's a very cool machine and perhaps I will have it proven to me that I'm still at fault. For what it's worth, the songs on the CDs still play perfectly. Thanks for you reply.

[jhollington]

Well, since you have the disk space, it might have been worth at least initially copying all of your music to your hard drive and then copying it to the iPod.

There's no requirement that the tracks on the hard drive once you've synced them up to your iPod, provided that you use manual synchronization mode. There are many people in these forums that are keeping their music only on their iPods and not on their hard drives.

Certainly, the [I]default behaviour in iTunes is to keep your music on your hard drive and sync it to your iPod. I wouldn't say that's what Apple prefers people to do (since they do provide other options), but they probably feel it's the easiest solution for novice users.

Regardless, from what you describe, it sounds like a transfer problem of some kind.... The database entries were put into iTunes and onto your iPod, but the files themselves weren't physically transferred. This is obviously not a normal situation, and I suspect that if the music had been copied from your hard drive (even in manual mode), things probably would have worked okay.

Incidentally, I just tried the process you described, and it worked fine for me referencing the music files from a DVD-RW.

Under iTunes Advanced Preferences (Edit->Preferences->Advanced), what did you have your iTunes Music Folder set to, and what were the settings for "Keep Music Folder Organized" and "Copy Files to iTunes Music Library..."?

[mcman]

Thanks for your continued interest in my problem. It is very possible that you may be correct in the theory that what I was doing would have worked better had the music been copied to my harddrive prior to going on the iPOD. To answer you questons I had the iTunes music folder defaulting to F:\iTunes (a partition on my harddrive), preferring that rather than have to drill down to Document/Settings/Music or wherever Apple had it going to. I had neither of the other to objects checked, seeing no reason to since I never had thought of leaving anything on my marddrive.

As I might have mentioned, I was terribly disappointed in having to return my iPOD. I dearly loved, and still do, the machine. Had I any inkling than the method I was using would have caused the problem, if in fact it did, you can believe I would have done things differently. I still have the CDs and they play perfectly well. The thing that made the so ill was the time I had invested in getting 63+ CDs to the POD and then all the editing I had to do to the titles and the artists names in iTunes. Oh, well, such is life. Thanks for you interest again. It is not beyond reason that I'll go back and buy another iPOD at a later date and just let it sync automatically. Have a great day.

[amcluesent]

>Thanks for your continued interest in my problem<

From what you've said, you don't want to have the MP3 files on the PC hard-disk, you just want them on CDs and (some) on the iPod.

To do this, you can put the iPod into manual sync mode. Then drag and drop the files from Windows Explorer onto the iPod symbol in the iTunes Source list. The files will be copied as you watch from the source CD to the iPod.

You can then use iTunes to to edit the MP3 tags of the files that are on the iPod.

[mcman]

The method you describe is exactly what I was doing with one exception. I was dragging the .mp3 files to the iTUNES library and then to the iPOD. I was under the impression that the files had to go into the library first and then to the POD so that is what I was doing. Thanks for your reply.