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
