Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with WindowsXP and ipod

What's up with my music files on my PC?

ishotjr — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:12:02 -0800

What is up with my music files' titles turning into nonsensical four-letter titles? Ok, this is a little long, but it's a weird problem that is hard to describe.

I use iTunes on a (Dell) Windows Vista PC laptop. I noticed this issue probably over a year ago, but was too lazy to do anything about it until now.

Thousands of my music files are in files within "C:\My Music" that are named with F and then a number, F00 thru F49. All of my music was originally in "C:\Users\ishotjr\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music," and some of it still is. Within the F-named folders, the files are named/songs titled in three different ways.
1) Most are with four letters in caps, example: AJOM. They are seemingly random and not acronyms of the real titles. Within this, most, in the artist/album, etc. fields in Windows Explorer, have the correct info. A few have nothing at all in those.
In either case, if I choose to play it in iTunes (by clicking the option within Windows Explorer, where I'm viewing the files), it brings me to the song that is properly titled within iTunes (i.e., AJOM takes me to "Levitate Me" by The Pixies in iTunes).
2) A few of the songs are named with their correct name, but with the track number proceeding it (i.e. 01 Debaser)
3) Even fewer are named completely normally, with just the actual song title.

Another weird twist is that in iTunes itself, there are a handful of files that are actually named with the four letter names. Most of these are all from a Velvet Underground greatest hits compilation, but there are a few that aren't.

There seems to be no pattern as to how I procured the music and what's in these weird files. I did bring most of the music onto my computer from my iPod when I got the computer, but some of it I have purchased since owning this computer. The software I used to bring the songs from the iPod to the computer was some free program that I don't recall the name of and deleted to save hard drive space when I was done using it.

The real kicker is that most of these weirdly-named tracks are NOT duplicates, so I can't just delete them. Most of the time, it's one or two songs from a given album that are named weird and in the F-named folder instead of in the folder with the rest of its album-mates.

It seems that I might be stuck consolidating the 49 "F" folders into one (not so hard, just tedious), then trying to rename the thousands of song backs to their proper names by clicking them through to iTunes and manually entering the name of each song into the file name in Windows, then moving all of the songs to the correct place. It's not necessary to do this to be able to listen to the songs, but it's annoying having my files all over the place, especially when I want to delete entire albums off of my hard drive to make space.

My actual question is two-part:
1) Has anyone ever had this weirdo thing happen to their music files before?
2) Does anyone know a better way to fix it than to do everything manually (which will take for-ev-er)?

Played Playa

ninazer0 — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:02:12 -0800

You guys gave me some brilliant music suggestions in a previous question. So here's the next part of the problem. I need to manage my music. There are issues and I'm feeling very stupid. I have 43 songs from a DRM source (Bigpond music)(very bad idea). The rest of my stuff is ripped from CD's. The 43 songs need to have licencing information in order to play. Being a slacker, I was using Windows Media Player to manage my music as that was what came with the laptop and I wasn't picky. Version 9 allows you to backup the licence information as well as the music. Version 11 doesn't seem to do this (if it does, I couldn't find out how). The DRM source no longer supports V9. I'm currently on V11 and looking at re-downloading the whole shebang again. I'm deeply unhappy with both Bigpond Music and Media Player and I don't want to go through this hassle every time I need to upgrade or reinstall.

My basic requirements are to play music on my PC in some sort of jukebox style and to transfer music to a portable player (I currently have an old Creative MuVo) or to a backup drive - all with the minimum hassle possible.

What is the easiest way to do this? Should I just bite the bullet and get an iPod? Frankly, if I threw away the 43 songs it wouldn't kill me but as I know nothing about the market, perhaps someone has a more practical suggestion? (God - I never want to have to feel this dumb again)

How can I load up my iPod from my wife's computer without disrupting her iTunes?

Faint of Butt — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:13:30 -0800

How can I load up my iPod from my wife's computer without disrupting her iTunes? I've got an iPod, and there are songs on it. My computer is currently out of commission, and I'm doing all my day-to-day online business on my wife's computer instead. We're going out of town on Friday, and I want to make sure my iPod is nice and loaded for the trip. The trouble is that my wife also has an iPod, and uses iTunes very heavily. How can I use her computer to load up my iPod, while being absolutely certain that her iPod and her iTunes directories will not be in any way disrupted? I don't care if my iPod gets wiped in the process; I can always refill it. It's her stuff I'm worried about. We're dealing with Windows XP.

PC won't recognize iPod

alona — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:03:29 -0800

My PC won't recognize my iPod. What can I do? I've tried everything on the apple website, and I've gone through several metafilter iPod trouble posts. Sadly, none of them seem to apply as in all cases, the problem seemed to be iTunes not recognizing the device, and not the whole computer.

So, I have a dandy iPod video, 30gb. I purchased it in December when I was in North America and I used my brother's laptop to upload songs. I have about 30 songs on there now.
And now I have app. 4GB of songs in my iTunes library at home and no way of getting it onto my iPod.

When I plug my pod in, it charges, but it doesn't even appear as a device in My Computer.

I have a suspicion that this has something to do with the fact that my computer's already recognized my copy of Windows XP as not being genuine.

What can I do to get my computer to recognize my iPod? Help, I'm desperate!

iPod Fails to Connect to PC

monju_bosatsu — Thu, 11 May 2006 07:05:52 -0800

Why won't my iPod show up correctly on my work PC? I have a 5th generation video iPod that I've used without difficultly on my both home and work PCs, both running Windows XP. Recently, the iPod stopped showing up correctly on the work PC, and instead displays in iTunes as "Vol1," not the correct name of the device. iTunes also fails to display any of the music on the iPod. I have the same problem with the new version of Winamp on my work PC, and it doesn't show up in diskmode, even though it's set to do so. I've tried resetting the iPod, but that doesn't seem to help. Any ideas?