I like to listen to books and some music while traveling and on vacation. My old mp3 player needed to be replaced. Looks like Apple is the only brand left on the market with mp3 players and storage capacity of 64GB. So I bite the bullet and got me an IPod 64GB. I planned just to "copy" all my mp3 files over and be ready after that simple job.
No chance. Apple is an entire new world to me. I have "only" some decades experience in the host and windows world. That is not helpful at all. It is fascinating to learn how the same things can be done with a total different approach.
Being a more recent Apple product buyer and former long-time PC user, I know what you mean. It takes a little getting used too, a little learning, and a little more money to be an Apple user. But, the number of times my products have given me or my kids trouble (either hardware or software) is very small. I'll probably always have one PC around the house with Windows on it, but as the PC machines lock up and die, they're being replaced with Apple products. It helps to have a good Windows-to-Apple How To book handy for a while till you get the hang of things when dealing with the iMacs, MacBooks, or iPod/iPads.
One thing I was smart enough to NOT do was let iTunes manage my music library. I have everything already organized by artist and album, yet even when not managing it, iTunes will report a particular song is from a different album than the one I got it from, nad it makes a mess of things. I don;t have every song I have on my iPhone, what I did was select the option to sync only selected songs, and created a playlist that I have enabled for synching. I pick and chose songs and add them to that playlist, then sync the phone (iPod works the same way). That way I only have what I want on the phone, not everything, and I also don;t have iTines messing up my alrady organized files and folders.
Another thing I did notice, the random shuffle on the iPhone is HORRIBLE. I have somewhere around 200 songs loaded right now and there are some it's never played and others that it plays every time I turn on shuffle.
--Randy
rrinker Wrote:... I also don;t have iTines messing up my alrady organized files and folders....
How did you do that? I had all my music mp3 and book mp3 files well organized in folders on my harddisk. iTunes did not honor that order and applied it's very own logic accordinb to the information found in the mp3 files. That is not bad if you start from scratch but I have some thousand files...
I hoped I could simply copy my windows folders on the iPod. That did not work at all. The IPod does only play m3 files that have been moved by iTunes under iTunes logic.
The iPod has to be able to recognize the songs and structure, so you cannot simply copy your Windows folders to the iPod (although you can copy files in folders if you have enabled use of the iPod as a drive). It is the "syncing" that does this.
However, I believe that you can still do what you want. I think the setting you might be looking for is Preference>Advanced. You can "uncheck" the Keep iTunes Media folder organized and Copy Media to iTunes Folder boxes to allow you to manage your library yourself.
Andrew
I have an RCA Pearl which works well for me. I use it about an hour a day while at the gym. I have a little over 200 songs with room for about 3 times that many.
The shuffle feature on mine was also horrible until I took all the songs out of their respective albums and put them all in one directory. I'm hearing sings I didn't even realize I had. I didn't really care about the album feature as I only pick selected songs from each album.
All this was done under Windows.
Tom