Ipod experts please help.

malcolm

Okay, so for the last 7 years I have not listened to music. I don't listen to music at work or at home, I'm thinking of starting to download some again and would like to get an Ipod Nano for the gym and bus ride downtown. I'm a pc user though and my mp3's would be from my hard drive not Itunes so I am wondering if I can copy mp3's from my pc to the Ipod? Does this work well?

Joseph Silverman

I think you can, but why not just get an MP3 player? Cheaper and just as functional, if all you're using it for is .mp3s.

aesir

yea, you might be better off just getting a cheaper generic brand mp3 player. Itunes over complicates what should be a very easy process imo.

malcolm

Haven't seen anything that charges through usb that is as small as the nano. Oh yeah and everyone at work is a Mac whore so I'll never hear the end of it if I get another brand. I have a hard enough time owning a pc at home, seriously Mac users are like scientologists they are constantly trying to justify the use of a Mac to me and telling me to buy one.

Geezus

Yeah malcolm all iPod's support mp3 also, all you have to do is grab iTunes, and throw the mp3's into that. It'll auto update your iPod whenever you plug it in or load iTunes. Ive had an iPod since release II (still kickin'). In my opinion, iPod's the way to go. But, I hear ya on the Mac-Nazi's...ugh.

On a side note, how have you survived for SEVEN YEARS without music!?

Snowfly

7 years without music...that's criminal!

i'm curious...why won't you use itunes?

Geezus

I think he meant not purchasing music from iTunes, atleast that's what I got from it. Though, I may be mistaken.

Snowfly

yeah i thought it sounded like a misconception too...or incompletely phrased.

it'll work. I don't think ipods would've been as successful without p2p mp3's and windows pc's.

malcolm

Yeah I'll use the Itunes I just don't want to buy from it. Not really sure what happened to music in my life, Napster got banned and my hard drive got formatted and then work took over my life for years. Music was not a necessity as strange as that sounds but I've missed it and its uplifting qualities, so I'm going to designate a hour a night to start a new song collection.

flaagan

Back when I actually used a portable mp3 player, creative labs' Nomad Zen was a welcome alternative to apple's iSuck. There's defintely a wide range of mp3 players available nowadays, with memory ranging from small hdd's to flash cards to built-in ram. Gotta ask yourself how much music you're looking to get. I stopped concerning myself with portable mp3 players when I realized that I only really needed music in my car. I ended up just going with car stereos that have mp3-cd capabilities. Some of the newer stereos support usb-memsticks (and those are getting HUGE) as an alternative to an ipod or media player, which could come in handy as it won't need a battery, and can easily be connected to any pc you're at.

Vailias

I got an insignia 2gb player and it works wonderously.
Its 99$, has a decent sized screen and comes with offers for all sorts of free music. Available at Best Buy. Also it has a slot for a micro sd card so you can double the memory if you want. (ipod nano 1gb is 79 2 gb is about double that. Plus the Insigina plays video in mp4 or divx format.. not that I've used that yet, but its nice to have.

Empty

Ew Itunes is crap. Use songbird or winamp even. Itunes wastes space and always screws up my files. I have an Ipod, but I regret wasting my money when all it does is cause problems. I used to have a linux partition installed on it which was nice I could just drag and drop my music on like a flash drive. Haha and I think its funny you can play video on ANY ipod, hell I was playing Doom/HL/Hexen on my nano. Kills the battery though.

[Songbird]
http://www.songbirdnest.com/
[Winamp]
http://www.winamp.com/

notman

There are also programs like Floola and Sharepod that allow you to transfer songs without iTunes.

snemmy

i really enjoy my iPod (which i got about half price for being refurbished) but i do not enjoy iTunes very much.

the way it organizes my music is fuckin annoying. if you've downloaded random mp3s and do not have the ID3 tags standardized in some way then you are in for a headache when looking in your library. and forget about your nice organized folders in C:\mp3s\artist\album etc.. you will probably forget to uncheck the 'copy to iTunes folder' when first starting and then BAM! you've taken up twice the space..

i dont like winamp much anymore since it doesnt like to read my japanese imports very well, if at all. damn it for not supporting japanese text encoding! (and dont tell me to install language packs, i looked around and found that it is winamp programming and not my windows machine. woot to macs for supporting all that shit out of the box )

adam

malcolm just get the ipod and use an app called 'sharepod'. I've never had to use iTunes once since switching to sharepod. You can copy music to and from the ipod easily.

Ignore itunes completely.

pior

I don't know wether Itunes is crap or not, I just simply don't like the idea behind it - yet I hear it works great for many happy users.

Isn't it possible to somehow flash an ipod to make it act like any classic mp3 player? (ie seen as a removable drive to simply drag files and folders to?)

Because if I ever go to some friend's place with an Ipod I want to share music from I don't want to have to ask the other person to install any unwanted app. Yeah I know you *can* put files on the 'harddrive' bit of the pod but from what I understand you cannot play them if they are stored there, which completely misses the point for me.

Ha! Trends!

dur23

Itunes sucks ass. Im pretty sure it's cause i have a hate on for itunes/quicktime thing. I use winamp to get the mp3s on over.

adam

pior - ipod already shows up like a harddrive on machines. The mp3s are renamed to an apple naming convention.

Sharepod reads that convention and feeds the info back to the user. The neat thing is when you go to take music off the iPod you can choose how you want the files named Album;Artist;Song.mp3 is generally how I go about it.

Sharepod is an exe you throw on the harddrive of your ipod. Just run it whenever you want to copy or move music/movies in and out of the ipod.

handy tool, im sure theres quite a few out there with similar functionality.

Entity

i've been thinking about getting an ipod video, the 80gb version. I've got tons of dvd's waiting to be converted, think it's worth it?

malcolm

Got the 8gig black holy shit fucking rip off! I wanted a white one but now they only make coloured ones now and silver. Picked up a 3 year warranty as well I'll have a look at that podshare thing, I don't really want to use itunes I'd rather just have folders full of songs. Why did apple have to make itunes so gay.

Entity

yamipod works too

Rick Stirling

[ QUOTE ]
Why did apple have to make itunes so gay.

[/ QUOTE ]

Excuse me sir, I think you dropped this: "?".

:P

I love iTunes, I don't get why people hate it so much, especially the people who simply declare "iTunes is CRAP!!!11"

Entity

yeah same here, the search feature beats everything i've used before (yep, even the one in the newest media player)

James Edwards

Yep, been using iTunes for years on a pc. I have no problem with it. My iPod video goes everywhere with me as well, also as my car stereo. I've never understood all the hassle people claim to have with either of them.

malcolm

Awesome then perhaps you can answer this question. I have already organized my folders by artist album on the pc and named the files 01_songname.mp3 Itunes uses the name under sorting tab to organize them for viewing, is there any way I can select multiple songs and have them renamed to match the actual file name on my pc? That would be nifty. Oh yeah and does anyone know what the sleep function does, it is not in the instructions.

Empty

Well itunes renamed all my files with to the same name, then duplicated most of them. Leaving me with a whole bunch of almost useless files and a headache.

notman

HOw about iTunes taking over my quicktime. So now all my quicktime files try to open in a little fucking square at the bottom of iTunes. It's a controlling, unnecessary, program. There is no need for it other than Apple requires it.

snemmy

i guess in my rant i should have mentioned that my only real problems come from the random mp3s ive collected for the past 8 years.
ripping straight from cds keeps everything nice and organized

Peris

Install rockbox on your ipod, it replaces the normal ipod firmware and is pretty awesome. Just drag the mp3's in your ipod like a usb drive. It can also play alot more formats than just mp3. And theres also alot of extras that come with it like interface skins and some games. You can also play doom with it which is pretty neat .

jam

I too was looking to get a nano not too long ago for exercising/commute, but decided to go with the 2GB Sony NW-E005F. It's got direct USB plug-in (no cables needed), built-in FM radio (apple makes you buy an accessory for FM radio), and got mine off ebay for 75 bucks, which is half the price of a 2GB nano.

Downside: like apple, sony also likes to use proprietary software to control your music file management...so instead of itunes, sony uses one called SonicStage.

The actual device loads on my PC as a drive though, so I can still drag/drop regular files such as documents, pictures, etc...

I'm pretty happy with it. Would like to see a 4 or 8GB version though.