Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mac and ipod

ipod touch updating error

klangklangston — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:27:22 -0800

Unknown error 0xE8000001 from ipod touch; won't connect. OSX 10.4.11, powerpc.

Last night, I tried to update my girlfriend's ipod touch software so that she could run apps (she'd been wanting it for a while, and I thought it would be a nice surprise). So, I paid my 4.95, downloaded the firmware… and got an error connecting to the iPod (the aforementioned 0xE8000001). I googled around, and it seemed like maybe I needed to update my iTunes version from 8 to 9. OK, so did that. Still, same error.

Fuck.

Now my iTunes says that I need to update my safari so that it can connect to the iTunes store, but I don't believe Safari 4 will run on a powerpc.

How can I: Revert to the earlier version of iTunes and how can I unfuck my girlfriend's iPod before she stabs me in the face?

backup --> iPod

Jaltcoh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:00:25 -0800

Trying to get my music library from my external hard drive back onto my iPod while maintaining my sanity. (Apologies in advance for the lengthy/convoluted question.) I recently started having problems with my iPod and realized I should make sure to have a perfect, up-to-date backup. I started by turning on the iPod's hidden files. If you're familiar with these hidden files, you know that they have randomly generated names like "VCKT.m4a," "BBLC.m4a," etc. (no apparent indication of which songs these are), and they're in folders called "F00," "F01," etc. (Mine go up to F49 since I have over 7,000 songs.) I copied all of these files to my external hard drive. At the time this seemed like a really smart, thorough way to do it.

Then I went to the Apple Store and got my iPod fixed, which involved them restoring my iPod. So now I need to recreate my music library in my iPod using the external hard drive.

I thought this would be pretty simple: plug in the iPod and external hard drive to my Macbook at the same time, then drag and drop all the folders -- F00 through F49 -- from the external hard drive to the iPod, right? Well, I did this, and the cryptically named files do appear in the iPod when you look at the iPod's contents in the desktop. But if you try to use the iPod as a normal music-playing device, it doesn't work -- there are no songs that show up for you to listen to (whether you're looking at it in iTunes or disconnected from the computer).

I again thought I was being smart by seeing what happens when I "open" one of the hidden files. Hey cool, a random song gets copied to iTunes! And it's a normal song -- not "VCKT.m4a" but something I can actually listen to, with a song title in English, etc. Of course, I can then drag and drop this song from iTunes into my iPod. At first I thought this would be the solution: just do the same thing for all the songs.

But there are a couple problems with that, and I'd really appreciate any help getting around them. As I said, I have over 7,000 songs, roughly 70 GB of music. My computer's hard drive has about 4 GB left. So if I were to just open all the hidden files from my iPod into iTunes at once, it'd be a disaster: at best, I'd quickly get a message telling me my computer's hard drive couldn't hold any more. (And I'd be afraid I wouldn't be so lucky -- the hard drive could get filled up and paralyzed. This happened to someone I know.)

So, should I just copy the hidden files one folder at a time? I could do that, but that would mean opening up the songs from "F00," waiting for them to get copied to iTunes, then waiting for them to get copied to the iPod, then deleting those songs from iTunes and emptying the trash, then moving on to "F01" ... and repeating that whole thing 50 times. I'd like to avoid that if I can.

So my questions are:

(1) Is there an easier way to do this? I'd love to be able to just get it started, then sit back and let the computer handle it.

(2) I already feel kind of silly for how much of a minor ordeal this has turned into as a result of my backup method that I (mistakenly?) thought was so clever. Could someone please assure me that there's a way to follow through with this that won't mess things up even further?

(In case it's relevant, my external hard drive holds about 500 GB, I have a 160 GB iPod, and I'm using Mac OS 10.4.11.)

iPhone's DRM - let my music go!

DandyRandy — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:46:10 -0800

Does the DRM on iPhone work differently than the DRM on, say, the iPod Classic? I've got an iPhone 3G as well as a 160 GB iPod Classic, both synced to my home computer (PowerMac G5), which also houses my >26k-track iTunes library. Both devices are set to allow me to manually manage music.

When I take those devices to work and connect them to iTunes on my Windows machine (also authorized by the iTunes Music Store), they work differently. I can play the music on the iPod using iTunes, but I cannot play the music on my iPhone - all the songs are grayed out in iTunes.

Is iPhone different in that regard?

For want of a sync, the party was lost.

Oktober — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:24:59 -0800

Is there any way to put music on an iPod touch without syncing it with itunes or buying from the WiFi store? I have some mp3s. I have my iPod Touch. I even have the docking cable. What I don't have is the machine it syncs to.

I want to add some mp3s from a different machine to my iPod touch without losing what's on there already. I've already tried e-mailing myself an mp3 and then downloading it out of gmail, but it said the attachment was too large and couldn't be opened. Any ideas?

Anyway to develop iPhone/iTouch apps without investing in a Mac?

nmaster64 — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:16:25 -0800

I'm interested in developing iPhone/iPod Touch applications, however my understanding is the SDK only works in OSX. I have a XP desktop and a Vista notebook with an AMD Athlon and Turion (both dual core) respectively, both pretty good machines. Is there any way to avoid spending serious cash buying a Mac just to get into iPhone development?

How ya like dem apples?

spicynuts — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:06:10 -0800

Brand new Mac convert - haven't used one since the IISE back in college. So far I love it but I have some questions about converting my peripherals or moving data like music, etc. So I bought a Macbook Pro. I have a self-built PC at home. All of my peripherals including digital film scanner, photo printer, color diagnostics, external storage, iPod, etc are PC. I'm going to slowly start migrating stuff over. So with that in mind, two questions:

1) How do I get my music that is stored in my PC formatted iPod or iTunes folders into my Mac so I can at least use the mac to play my music through iTunes?

2) Is it possible to reformat my iPod for the mac and have it function properly with the dock that I have? Or do I need to buy a mac specific doc?

Thanks!

Upgrade my Mac and still share my iTunes with XP?

Rafaelloello — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:51:31 -0800

OSX (Tiger) and XP are currently sharing one iTunes library via MacDrive and some trickery but I'm gun-shy upgrading iTunes or moving to Leopard... I am currently able to access my Mac iTunes (7.4.2) and Mac formatted iPod from XP on my dual-booting Mac (still running the BootCamp beta from last fall). I have been gun-shy to upgrade my Mac OS or iTunes for fear of losing this functionality. I upgraded iTunes last fall under both XP and OSX and it broke and I had a devil of a time rolling both versions back (thanks Winclone!) to regain what I had before the upgrade. Ever since I've resisted most of the Apple software updates. I love having one library and have the added bonus of being able to sync my Mac formatted iPod and access my iTunes Store account from the XP side through the wonders of MacDrive 7. I was wondering if anybody else has been able to achieve this level of parallelism on later versions of iTunes and/or Leopard. All I did was install iTunes on both OS's and point them at the same library on the Mac HFS partition. Macdrive 7 makes this partion readable/writable by XP. The only trickery involved is renaming your Mac "iTunes Library" to "iTunes Library.itl". Apparently OSX doesn't car if you add the "itl" extension and its required on the XP side.

Even if nobody has done this, maybe someone would be brave enough to try and let me know how it goes, maybe on a fully updated version of Leopard? You can download a fully functional version of MacDrive from mediafour.com but it's only good for 5 days.

Thanks in advance.

PC iPod + New Macbook = Headache

Hollow — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:30:06 -0800

PCtoMacFilter: Is there an easier (faster) way to get my 37 gigs of music stranded on my PC formatted iPod onto my new Macbook than copying it to a PC with 3rd party software, burning it to dvds, and then ripping the dvds onto the Mac? Apple says "no," but please tell me they are wrong.

What is the best (or any) Mac software to put protected WMAs on my iPod?

x41-pbj — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:48:26 -0800

What is the best (or any) Mac software to put protected WMA audiobooks, from my local library via NetLibrary, on my iPod? I'm trying to put the free audiobooks that my library offers on my iPod, but can't find a Mac solution.

My library, like many many others, is using NetLibrary to offer audiobooks to its members, but for whatever reason, not only do NetLibrary's wma files not work on iPods, there is no way to access the site with a Mac -- I've tried Firefox, Safari, Camino, Flock and none of them have worked. Bleh!

So there is one previous AskMeFi thread on this topic -- posted here -- which offers the good suggestion of TuneBite on Windows, but I can't find anything comparable for Macs, or anything free for Windows (Tunebite is $25).

Any help is hugely appreciated. Libraries are supposed to be free, right? Right!

Digital camera movies into an iPod?

keijo — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:47:16 -0800

When movies taken with a digital camera have been transferred to iPhoto, how to get one out to one's iPod to show around? My dad has a Canon Digital IXUS 950 IS, and syncs the camera with his Mac with his photos and the occasional movie ending up in the iPhoto library. Now, he would like to transfer a couple of these movies to his video iPod. I know you need to do this via iTunes, but i cannot even make the movies show there much less transfer them over. Help the poor iPodless son.

iPod keeps derailing

emelenjr — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:12:43 -0800

My old iPod is behaving badly. Is there something wrong with it or something wrong with the tracks I'm trying to play? I have a 40GB 3G iPod (the kind with the four touch-sensitive buttons above the wheel). The battery is already giving out--I know that much. But something weird is going on with a number of tracks on two albums I purchased from the iTunes store recently. That is, the iPod skips over those tracks. I'm not set to shuffle, I'm not in a playlist with those tracks missing.

Curiously, I was able to play the tracks in iTunes through my iPod (rather than using the iTunes library) so I'm inclined to think there's nothing wrong with the tracks that would make the iPod want to skip them.

What gives? Is this a common problem with aging iPods? I'm planning to upgrade eventually but, dammit, the tracks the iPod is skipping are good ones.

Make iTunes Growl at me when it finishes synching my iPod.

smallerdemon — Wed, 09 May 2007 11:59:13 -0800

Mac / iPod / iTunes / Growl Filter: I would like to know when my iPod has completed synchronizing via Growl. Is there an existing Growl plugin module that I can use to do this? I have searched and found nothing. Am I just going to have to create a Automator or AppleScript to run when the synch is finished that notifies Growl?

I add artwork to my ipod but it doesn't show up!

slhpatterson — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:47:49 -0800

I have a Windows-formatted ipod that I run a mac. I am having trouble manually adding artwork to my ipod. I am unable to add the artwork in itunes and then view it on my ipod. The artwork will show up in itunes, but not on the ipod. Any suggestions? Thanks for any help!

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

rglass — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:26:06 -0800

Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods. Itunes is not counting play counts and recently played tracks from my ipods.

I have a 3G ipod and a 1G nano which I sync about once a week with itunes 7.0 on my Macbook.

When I play songs on itunes, the play count for that song increases by one and it appears in the Recently Played playlist (and is submitted to LastFM, by the way).

When I connect my ipod and do a complete sync, play counts are not updated and songs played do not seem to appear in the Recently Played playlist (and are not submitted to LastFM).

I have both ipods to sync specific playlists, and I have not checked the box that says "Manually Manage Music" on the ipod summary screen (I heard that can cause sync problems).

I thought it might be a chronology problem – that if I played my last ipod track at 2 PM and my last itunes track at 3 PM, that when I did a sync it wasn't tracking anything from before my last played itunes track. (Did I explain that clearly?) But that isn't it. I've been using itunes for years and I've never seen it behave that way before,
and I just did a test, using my ipod for 24 hours without playing any tracks on itunes. I did a sync, and none of them are in Recently Played, and the play counts have not changed.

What's going on? How can I get itunes to keep track of the songs I play on my ipod? (Can't get them submitted to LastFM either, but that's a secondary issue).

How to get songs off of a Mac-formatted iPod in Windows?

JacksonEsquire — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 10:10:55 -0800

Is there a way to get songs off of a Mac-formatted iPod in Windows? My girlfriend's iBook G4 recently drowned in a pool of water. Nothing was able to be recovered from the hard drive and we'd like to get all 40GB of songs from her iPod.

However, we only have Windows machines to work with. Is there any possible way to get the songs off of the iPod? Or are we screwed.

I've heard of programs such as PodUtil, etc..., but don't think they'll work with Mac-formatted ipods.

Does the new iPod shuffle do hand-picked playlists better/faster/differently from the old one?

Doctor Barnett — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:19:34 -0800

I have an old shuffle. When I first got it, I could arrange its playlist on the iMac it syncs to without it actually being plugged in. This was fast, since it all happened on the computer. Then, I could plug in the shuffle and the actual synchronization would churn for about 30 sec (which I would not need to be present for). But in one of iTunes' famously regressive "upgrades," the ability to arrange tracks on my shuffle without it being plugged in vanished. Now, arranging tracks is a laborious process with delays between every user interaction. It sucks. No way am I buying a cute tiny colorful new one if it has the same crappy synchronization method. Does it? (I'm aware of iTunes' ability to pick random tracks from my library. No thanks!)

Automatic iPod Settings?

interrobang — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 18:15:48 -0800

A fairly simple iPod/iTunes question—when I plug in the iPod, I would like the browser on iTunes to automatically be there (so I don't have to press apple + b), and I'd like it to be arranged by album, by year (so I don't have to click the "year" field every time). Is this possible? Is there a setting that I'm missing?

ipod/itunes troubleshooting question

Soulbee — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:57:26 -0800

I upgraded to itunes 7.0, not noticing all the negative reviews, and now everything is all screwed up. I have a Ibook running the most recent update of OSX (10.3.9 or something like that), and everything else is up to date as well. I have a 5g 30 gig Ipod. I started having problems when i tried to add artwork to my Ipod, it gave me an unknown error (0-50), and said it couldn't update the ipod. So after following various instructions found online to fix the problem, I decided to reset my ipod to factory new condition and revert to itunes 6.0. I clicked the "restore" button in itunes to reset and it said it could not reset my ipod! I think it was error 39. So now, with artwork disabled on the ipod, it's working OK but sometimes I can't get it to turn off, and this morning it's started resetting itself periodically. plus, i heard you can't use the ITunes store with the older version of itunes, so I'm disinclined to downgrade, especially considering that i can't seem to wipe my ipod and start over anyway. it seems like everything i can find online about the latest troubles with itunes indicate the persisting troubles are mostly for PC users...but this is a big pain, and it's especially concerning that my ipod has started randomly resetting itself while playing here at my desk. what's going on? what should I do?

My Library! Its being held prisoner! Oh, sob, all my lovely ratings....

Brainy — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:39:07 -0800

Had PC, got Mac, want to get ALL my songs + metadata off my iPod and into my Mac library. Have tried a few programs and they didn't work out exactly right. Your recommendations please! I tried this a couple of weeks ago and I tried Senuti and iPodRip and neither of them worked (although I can't remember how, maybe one errored, one didn't copy playcount or something). So what programs do you guys recommend? I NEED my ratings, playcount, last played date, as I have tons of smart playlists based on them.

Listening to iPod via PC

rossination — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:38:07 -0800

How can I listen to my mac-formatted iPod through my PC at work? I have a mac-formatted iPod (5G, FWIW) that I would like to be able to plug into the USB port on my PC at work and listen to via a program such as PodPlayer, which is installed on the iPod and run from the PC. However, when I try to plug in my 'Pod to any PC, it tells me that the drive is not formatted, and that I have to reformat it to make it readable.

So - do I need to reformat the iPod on my mac so that it can be read by Windows? Is there a way to do this that lets me to use my iPod as normal on the mac, but also allows files on it to be read by a PC?

Mac is chafing me.

catfishjohn — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 23:27:15 -0800

Why does my mac (G4) refuse to play some of the songs that I've downloaded from legitimate music sites on the internet? These songs such as "Beat Up Cars" by Moonlight Towers, which I downloaded from their website into a quicktime file, will play directly from my computer's speakers, but won't transfer to my ipod or play over airtunes. In the middle of a mix my computer (playing through airtunes) will switch to the computer's speakers instead of playing through my stereo via wifi. It's extremely frustrating. Is this some kind of licensiing thing?

Is my only option to get the songs into my ipod and over airtunes to burn thems to a CD then re-upload them to my itunes. Seems crazy, no?

ipod will not upload photos

jamie939 — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:22:22 -0800

My ipod will not upload photos...Music is no problem but at the end of the upload process, after is has completely gone through the new photo's from iphoto, I get a message that reads "ipod cannot be updated. The file (Name of my ipod) cannot be found. I then unplug, all music is there but photos are not. I work on a Mac PowerBook G4. Any suggestions?

It's not that I'm lazy...

avocet — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 09:36:12 -0800

I've got a few questions regarding playing audio & video on a Macbook Pro using its remote. 1. If my iPod is mounted, is there any way I can browse it using the remote interface? I'd love to be able to scroll through my iPod music instead of what's on my hard drive - I haven't had a chance to put much music on my MBP since I got it.

2. Is there a way to watch videos with the remote and have them open in VLC instead of QT?

It's not a huge deal if the answer to both questions is 'no', but I'm wondering if there's a way to get around it. Thanks in advance!

Self-powered USB Hubs?

AndrewH — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 19:18:16 -0800

Hello MetaFilter. This is my first question, so I thought I'd start with something easy. I'm looking for a a USB hub that runs off it's own adapter. Any recommendations? I have a G4 PowerBook with two under-powered USB ports. USB thumbdrives and mice work fine, but iPods don't. My iPod Photo is dead, and the 5G iPod Video is USB only. I was considering a PCMCIA USB card, but I'm not really sure I trust those (if my USB ports are under-powered, what else is?) and it seems like a hub would be cheaper.

So what does the MetaFilter community like?

iPod and iTunes: balancing the books

vkxmai — Sat, 27 May 2006 10:12:57 -0800

I have 90GB of mp3s on a hard drive and 27GB of mp3s on my 5th generation iPod. How do I determine which songs on my iPod are already present in my 90GB library, and which ones aren't, using a smart playlist? I read this thread: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/34763 but really didn't find what I was looking for. Many of the songs on my iPod were there before I got my mbp and before I put all of my music into one library using iTunes.

I would like to find out which songs are only on my iPod so I can back them up to a hard drive and then use smart playlists and sync to safely manage the contents of the iPod.