I love mine too! In fact, yall know what I just did? I hooked mine up via
stereo red/white RCA cables to my RCA mini component system out in my den.
That thing's pushing 300 watz for both speakers, and both channels, so
basicly 150 wats per speaker. Sure beats the heck outta those little
Gateway PC speakers I did! have it going through.
Chris.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jacob Schmude" <[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 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: Update on Nano issue.
I just got my 4th gen nano yesterday (finally). I can confirm that with
iTunes 8.0.1 and firmware 1.0.2 it is generating spoken entries whenever
something is moved to the iPod, regardless of whether it is synched or
manually dragged. This is with the Mac version of iTunes of course, no
idea about Windows. Also this is the 16gb model, though I doubt that would
matter. I absolutely love my nano!
On Nov 4, 2008, at 18:34, Esther wrote:
Hi Chris,
Maybe this is a new feature!<smile>
On Nov 4, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Christopher Gilland wrote:
Ester, that is really weird, as I just tried with my Nano doing a drag
and rop, and actually, it spoke perfectly.
Oddness.
Chris.
I'm not sure what is going on with your Nano, but when I tried dragging
and dropping new content that had never been placed on my iPod before --
in any incarnation of the iTunes data base or player, whether restored
or not --- I didn't get spoken menus. Sounds as though you managed to
trigger something across the boundary of what syncs and what gets
transferred.
Is your iPod still configured for data mode?
Incidentally, I don't think that David's explanations work for what has
been going on with your iPod, but I'm not sure which files keep track of
recognizing the device. That could be in the binary file that we can't
get to directly. Only the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file is used to
communicate with other programs, and that may not be where the weird
things are happening.
Cheers,
Esther
----- 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
