Hi Chris,
On Nov 4, 2008, at 3:22 AM, Christopher Gilland wrote:
Ester, as for your mis-understanding, no, my father is probably
gonna wind up using his laptop which is a Windows machine to manage
his music. The only reason that I synced it with my Mac, was
because it was his bd, and I wanted to open the thing up, and have
it pre-loaded for him with some of his favorite tracks. Yeah, I
know: he only can sync it with one library, which awe great! means
now, he can't sync it with his Inspiron 1000 unless he first erases
the content currently on it. Now, Apple did! tell me, of a work
around. I dono how true it is though. I don't have another IPod to
test it with. Apparently, when it says it's synced with another
library, do I wanna erase and sync with the new computer, someone
told me if you click on cancel, then go to the settings of the IPod,
and switch it to manually manage in the summary tab, then, I can
actually at that point use the drag drop option, and just manage it
that way, yet not delete anything. I dono how true that is, but
anyway, that's what they told me, at least.
This trick doesn't work for your father, because you formatted the
iPod on a Mac. He's not going to be able to "see" these files on his
PC unless he goes through a third party tool. Traditional tools, like
MacOpener, got discontinued last year. In any case, he should restore
his iPod on the PC.
Yes, the work-around Apple told you about can let him add content
manually to his iPod from other PCs that he isn't sync'd to. When he
connects his iPod (which is now synced to his iTunes account on his
PC) to another Windows iTunes installation (say, your account on your
Windows machine), he'll get prompted with a message that tells him
that his iPod is synced to another machine, and asks him whether he
wants to erase and sync to this new library. (In the past, this is
where knowing about overriding the autosync by holding down the
Command and Option keys on a Mac, or the Control and Shift keys on a
PC, really paid off -- because you didn't used to get prompted about
this!). At this point he can set up the options to manually manage
the iPod in the summary tab, and those settings will be applied
whenever he connects the iPod to that iTunes account. He (or you) can
drag and drop playlists onto that iPod. The playlists can even
contain DRM'd tracks (from iTunes or Audible) provided that his iPod
is authorized to play them (this gets tricky if you've set him up as a
separate account in iTunes; it's less tricky for Audible since you can
have content from up to two different Audible accounts authorized to
play on a single iPod).
For older iPods, you could play them cross-platform provided they were
formatted for Windows. The rule is that Macs can read Windows FAT
formatted files, but Windows can't read Mac file formats. So if iPods
were formatted for Windows, you could add content to them from both
Windows and Macs iTunes installations, provided that you only used
manual file transfers and not auto-sync (which assumes that you can
overwrite the files on the device with files on your computer). The
way to think about this is that you can easily use USB memory sticks
cross-platform, and these are FAT32 format files. The first generation
iPod Shuffle is basically like a USB memory stick with expanded play
capability. These cross-platform iPod systems start to become
unstable when you try to handle things like videos or extensive album
artwork cross-platform. There are also issues about maximum character
length in Window file names and forbidden characters. Non-English
characters (accents, symbols) don't always get handled correctly under
the Windows format. Still, if you stick to simple music and audiobook
files (and audio podcasts), it's pretty straightforward. I manually
transfer content from my Mac to a first generation iPod Nano that was
formatted for Windows and has never been updated. (It's associated
with someone else's machine, but has always been left in manual
mode). This kind of cross-platform use is probably not possible with
the 4G Nanos -- certainly not if you want speakable menus, which
relies on the "sync" to generate the spoken bits. In the (distant)
past iPods (especially hard-drive iPods) used to come pre-formatted,
and you would run "updates". Now the original format/install is done
automatically through iTunes, so the way the device is formatted
depends on your operating system, adn this is automatically detected.
The more general trick, of setting iPods to manual mode and
transferring additional content (via VoiceOver drag and drop) when
these iPods are not connected to the accounts they sync with, will
work for both Mac and PC platforms. However, the down side is that
unless they "sync" you won't get spoken menu clips generated for the
content. If I drag and drop additional tracks to a 4G Nano they will
appear on the disk. Sighted users will see their entries under
playlists, artist, etc. on the Nano screen. You just won't hear any
spoken content for these entries. To generate the spoken clips, you'd
have to add these files to your iTunes library and sync them.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
