iTunes->DS?

April 7, 2008 2:06 PM

1. How do I get my music off of iTunes and into a usable (DS-friendly) format? 2. Is there any good software for making a DS into an mp3 player? I don't care about ratings or album covers, but playlists are nice.

I've lost my iPod. My music is on (fucking) iTunes, but most of it was copied and imported from my iPod and therefore is encoded in that annoying 4-letter form (e.g. MQRF). How do I get my artist and song name data back? Thanks in advance and sorry for bringing another iPod question to Metafilter.

posted by Citizen Premier to technology (6 comments total)

Oh yeah, it might be useful to note It's a PC with good ol' Windows 2000.
posted by Citizen Premier at 2:09 PM on April 7, 2008

I can answer part of the question. If you want to get the proper names back for the music you copied from the iPod, you just want to put it back into iTunes. Go to "Preferences" and then the "Advanced" tab. You can select "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized" which will give your library consistent file names and folder structure again. The music files you copied back from the iPod, while the file name is not correct, has in-fact retained the ID3 tags that have the Title/Artist and such. So, drag all the music back into iTunes, then go to "Advanced" and then "Consolidate Menu".

That takes care of half the battle, I don't know all that much about the DS so I'll let somebody else tackle that.
posted by cgomez at 2:13 PM on April 7, 2008

If by "DS" you mean "Nintendo DS", the software you're looking for is called "MoonShell." It comes preloaded on most of the Slot 1 homebrew cards available. I haven't yet bought one, but my research suggests that the M3 DS is generally liked, and there are a couple of others. One thing -- Slot 1 homebrew carts can't play GBA homebrew, and don't have the extra slot 2 RAM that some of the PassMe + Slot 2 solutions have (useful for certain DS software).
posted by Alterscape at 3:12 PM on April 7, 2008

I got an R4DS card for my DS which claims to play MP3s. Not sure if it supports playlists. If your music is in MP3 format you should be good to go. the R4DS uses MicroSD so you'll have to go buy a storage card in addition to the DS card. per Alterscape, I believe it uses Moonshell as the UI.
posted by GuyZero at 3:49 PM on April 7, 2008

R4 plays mp3s, they typically sound pretty quiet though.
posted by cloeburner at 4:57 PM on April 7, 2008

I have an M3DS and it is pretty damn sweet. Plain old MP3's play great and Moonshell is preinstalled. The only drawback is that the interface for the M3DS/Moonshell is pretty clunky and that is particularly jarring on the DS because you are trained to expect the interface to be so good.

I'd recommend getting the one with the rumble/ram pack for slot two, so you can use your DS as a web browser (the Opera browser requires the RAM add-on).
posted by dirtdirt at 6:12 PM on April 7, 2008