Ester, that is really weird, as I just tried with my Nano doing a drag and
rop, and actually, it spoke perfectly.
Oddness.
Chris.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Esther" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by
theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 3:24 PM
Subject: Re: Update on Nano issue.
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
