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
