iPod compatibility with tray-loading Mac?
December 14, 2004 9:39 AM   Subscribe

Was there any generation of iPod that was compatible with a tray-loading iMac? If not, what mp3 player/software would you recommend for such a user?
posted by blueshammer to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Low End Mac has specs and upgrade info for older Macs. The tray-loading iMac I had was USB only, and the Apple iPods are FireWire devices, so that's the problem I'd see. The questions I'd research are whether all the tray-loading iMacs are FireWire-free or whether the PC-targetted USB iPods would work with FireWire-free iMacs.
posted by caitlinb at 9:49 AM on December 14, 2004


They all feature FireWire and USB2. Apple's iPod download page thingy says you can use it with a Mac with USB(2).. iTunes should work but it'll be awfully slow.

FWIW you can get upgrades from Sonnet Technologies and such that will add FireWire ports to your machine - the Harmonis specifically, and you'll also get a faster CPU to boot.
posted by mrg at 10:32 AM on December 14, 2004


er.. will be awfully slow due to the fact that your Mac has USB1.1. (they're backwards compatible.)
posted by mrg at 10:33 AM on December 14, 2004


Is this iMac running OSX? From what I've gleaned, iTunes refuses to recognize iPods plugged into USB1.1 ports.
This iPod Lounge thread gives a workaround for 3G iPods using the Audion software. The latest 4G iPods seem to be more locked-out, especially with regards to support with OS9.
posted by zsazsa at 10:43 AM on December 14, 2004


Rio Karma is a hard drive player that has a dock that allows you to access the unit over an ethernet network, and a version of their content manager is written in Java to take advantage of this. Firmware upgrades, however, require a pc or VirtualPC and a usb connection. I was given a Karma and have used it with my Mac, but I also have a Win98 box hanging around that I use for the Karma, as the performance under VPC sucks.

Rio's other flash-based players all require USB and Windows, so if your friend doesn't have VirtualPC, or possibly VMWare, this would not work.
posted by mzurer at 2:37 PM on December 14, 2004


Most hard disk MP3 players require special software, but most current flash ones don't and just mount as disks, so I'd go with one of those. Make sure you get it from somewhere with a nice returns policy, since some are very badly designed. And just to correct mrg, the early models (1G/2G) don't have USB, only the ones with a dock connector.

(I just released an app for managing files on mp3 players. I probably shouldn't link to it myself, but you can find it on versiontracker)
posted by cillit bang at 8:36 AM on December 15, 2004


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