iPod headache!
For years I’ve been using an iPod classic linked to an old version of iTunes on an old laptop which I kept separate from the newer model I used for work. Old laptop has finally died and I’ve meanwhile upgraded my work model, so now managing music through recently downloaded iTunes on the one I’ve had for about six years.
The problem I’m finding is when I connect the computer and iPod and try to organise tracks that are on the latter it only shows me the track title, no other information, which makes it really difficult to locate and reorganise tracks. Also, it seems to have duplicated some albums on the device but not all.
I can’t find any information to resolve this through Google searches and various forums, and suspect it’s down to Apple making it difficult for people to use its old devices. But if anyone can shed any light on the problem it would be appreciated.
I had a similar problem syncing my iPad to my mac just yesterday.
Apple in its infinite wisdom has ditched iTunes and replaced ir with something called
Music which you have to sync via Finder.
Not sure if it will help solve your problem, but will
dig out and send you the article that tells you how to that.
I had a similar problem syncing my iPad to my mac just yesterday.
Apple in its infinite wisdom has ditched iTunes and replaced ir with something called
Music which you have to sync via Finder.
Not sure if it will help solve your problem, but will
dig out and send you the article that tells you how to that.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201253
Now if only someone could show me how to delete duplicate comments!
You can delete within 15 minutes *, just click on “Edit/Delete comment” below
* which means you still had 7 minutes when you asked about it
I know that you can edit/ delete within 15 mins, D,
and have done so many times in the past
The problem is that now when there are two posts it
seems it’s no longer possible to edit or delete either
of them.
Thank you Jaygee. I’ll have a go at that.
“Buy a Fiio”.
Sorry, but I couldn’t resist…
I bought the M7 recently and it’s terrific.
Do the M’s sound better than the X’s? (Full disclosure – I have an X5ii)
The X5ii has twin AK4490 DACs. The M7 has ESS 9018 DACs.
The M9, M11 & M15 have AK chips.
If you have deep enough pockets, the M17 (£1500) has twin ESS 9038s, which are the best DAC chips in the world – as fitted to Oppo BD players, etc.
Generally, the AK and ESS DACs are similar, although ESS chips have the edge – they are the best available.
AK have had production “issues” since their factory burned down – I’d expect the M9, M11 & M15 to be rejigged soon.
Thanks. Think I’ll keep my X5ii going for a bit longer – sounds like large sums for marginal gains in sound quality – ‘twas ever thus, I suppose…
My fave DAC chips were by Wolfson Microelectronics, but they were taken over by Cirrus Logic in 2014.
I’d aim for something like the M11 – that’s the one @chrisf has I think – once it has been pimped by ESS.
It is indeed and a very good player it is. I see that they have just announced the M11 Plus with ESS chips – probably not enough of a gain for me to upgrade (plus I am more than happy with my current one).
https://www.fiio.com/m11plusess
The only issue with the M11 Pro that I have is that it would have been nice to use lossless Apple Music on it – whilst Apple Music in on Android now and can be installed on the M11 Pro, a bug in the Samsung processor means that it can’t authenticate the sign on to Apple Music, so doesn’t work. This is probably something that Samsung are not going to bother to fix. I think the newer models don’t use this processor and the issue is limited to the M11 Pro.
M’mmmm…..chips…..
Am I alone in wondering who on earth would pay €750 for a personal music player no matter how sonically fab it is, nevermind twice that amount for the M17?
Ah, the answer just dropped…
Shut up, we’re thinking about chips here!
You can pay considerably more than that for a top-of-range smartphone.
Not me, Lodey – I refer you to my comment above about paying large sums for marginal gains…
Speaking as someone who is currently employing a builder to soundproof a garage, I could save a lot (of Mrs F’s cash) by wearing headphones. And by trading in the drumkit for an electric one.
But where’s the fun in that, eh?
My lad has a decent Roland electronic drum kit but it still needed to be in the garage because the tap tap tap and the noise of the kick drum and hi hat pedals came through the ceiling when it was upstairs. It’s currently in the loft while he’s at uni. I’ve spent my life moving stuff around the house, most of it it heavy and awkward and mostly it doesn’t belong to me.
Anyone can spend their money however they like, no problem with that. I have a (largely unused these streaming days) hifi system in the West Wing that cost over 2 grand. I still struggle however with the idea of spending oodles of dosh on a modern-day Walkman even though it is sonically fabulous. Same goes for ludicrously expensive smartphones when there are perfectly acceptable models available at a third of the price
But, Lodey, horses for courses, innt? If you work backwards from “I have magnetic planar headphones and I like to listen loud”, the standard output of a phone (about 100mW) will give up before the cans have even got warmed up. The output of a Fiio will be able to crank them up until my ears bleed, and beyond.
Using earbuds, there probably won’t be much of a difference. I use a SanDisk Sport Plus with earbuds for podcasts/housework, but it wouldn’t have enough grunt for music on big cans.
If may be that, with a newer version of iTunes, it has reorganised the iPod as I had something similar (but not the same) happen when I accidentally started iTunes when my iPod was connected and it took me a few weeks to rebuild the database and recover everything.
In the end, I pulled all the files off the iPod, restored it to factory settings and rebuilt the entire iPod. With a newer iTunes, I had to also upgrade to a newer version if MediaMonkey to write to the iPod.
It may be that your newer version of iTunes has caused a problem with the iPod and a full rebuild may be necessary.
That said, that’s not as painful as it sounds as the music files are easily accessible on an iPod classic and mp3tag should recover all of the information embedded in each file for you automatically
For a well-filled 160GB iPod Classic, that’s going to take *ages*.
Mp3tag helped as it was able to rebuild the database from the data embedded in each file. But I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t considerable time still spent on getting everything just right.
I’m glad I’ve stuck with my policy of not updating iTunes for years on the basis that every update from Apple makes things worse.
@Twang
Very, very true.
They just seem to change things for change’s sake.
If it ain’t broke, fix it with something that is
I’ve completely given up on iTunes (or Music as we must now call it) because I got fed up with its mysterious ways. I switched everything to Roon, which is expensive but, er, just works once you’ve figured out its eccentricities. The Roon community is impatient with ignorant civilians though.
I’m a bit of a fan of Waltr Pro, a Mac app which plays nice with iOS and works with iPods too apparently. You might have to start again though.
I’ve had a look at the Roon site and I hate everything about it already. Everything.
Shan’t bother to try and convert you then.
One man’s “mysterious ways” are another man’s “eccentricities”. I don’t use maybe ninety per cent of iTune’s “features”, and it’s mildly irritating to have them at all, but I don’t use ninety per cent of my brain, either (and the ten percent I do use is definitely low bitrate mp3 quality).
It was its habit of splitting albums into two or three and refusing to join them up that finally drove me away. Yes I know, metadata, but it just didn’t want to be so damn fussy in my humble o.
Yup, it does tend to do that. But it generally takes only a couple of clicks to see why it’s misbehaving (often to do with sorting, or inconsistencies in metadata).
The people who decide metadata rules are not my friends. World’s going to hell in a handcart and all they care about is misbehaving metadata. Where’s the problem in taking a bunch of tracks that all have the same album title and collecting them in an album?
Exactly, Mike. It’s Health & Safety gone mad.
I use a program called copy trans
https://www.copytrans.net/
Copy trans manager is free and works really well once you get the hang of it. You can add and remove songs and edit tags with it.
Thanks for contributions all. They have confirmed my suspicions that Apple is just making its own products more difficult to use.
The haven’t a clue what to do next. It’s basically a creatively bankrupt and directionless company that still thinks it’s doing stuff first and then doing it better. Those days are long gone.
You’re most likely to hit issues like this if your library contains MP3 files. This is due to there being several different ways to set MP3 tags, with some capable of holding more information than others. It meant that some of the track metadata was only stored in iTunes and not the files themselves. The issue only affected files created outside of iTunes, as iTunes itself created MP3 files with the latest tag specification which can handle all tag fields.
The fix was to use iTunes to convert the MP3 tags to the very latest version which can handle all such data. I’m not sure if the option to convert MP3 tags is still in iTunes – I’ve not used such files to store music for many years purely due to this problem.
For years now I run everything that’s going into my iTunes library through mp3tag before i add it and, touch wood, haven’t had any problems for a long time. Mp3tag is such a brilliant piece of software and to make myself feel better it’s one of the few free programmes that I regularly donate to.
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/
I would try alternatives to iTunes but tbh it really has only given me minor problems over the years and it’s the basis for my Sonos library on a NAS and a huge chunk of the library is on my iPhone for mobile listening, so changing it would be a real pain.
As ever, make sure you have multiple backups so if anything untoward does go wrong you can always start all over again.
Very similar here…iTunes to download podcasts and keep track of those. Then bring everything into mp3tag to sort, standardise covers and naming and to date. And then to Mediamonkey to actually put it on the iPod.
Convoluted? Very much so but all that helps to keep music, audiobooks and podcasts filed exactly as they should be
Can’t you tag tracks in iTunes? You can edit titles, sleeves, metadata, sorting – what else do you need? And your iPod is a direct line.
You can, but I found that doing it that way still allowed occasional glitches with some of the metadata, things like an alternative album cover appearing for some reason or the dreading splitting of albums based on contributing artists . A quick 2 minute run through mp3tag before importing the files to iTunes stops that happening.
Sonos also requires an album cover file not above a certain size in the album folder to work best and mp3tag allows you to simply create and drag that file to the folder in one go.
»Unwanted album cover« and »splitting of albums« are all caused by incorrect tagging in iTunes – you have to know what to do and which boxes to check. But if you’re content to get your covers through web search…
And »quick two minutes« to tag a track? I tag my tracks with composer, musicians line-up, release date and recording info such as studio and date: that barely takes a minute on iTunes.
Tried iTunes but mp3tag is just better at organising mp3 files than any other software. It’s integrated with musicbrainz so can pick up metadata automatically but it is as easy to just add the data manually.
And as Ainsley says, a part of it is about ensuring that albums are filed together on the iPod and are not split up based on the data iTunes has available to it.
Also, everything on the iPod is then organised by genre, artist, album, etc. No point in having the Christmas albums scattered around the iPod when they can be kept together. And mp3tag is just very good at organising music files with little fuss.
As I said – it’s not “iTunes” that splits albums, it’s your way of tagging. Use the “album artist” and “compilation yes/no” boxes to control this. But anyway, if you’re OK with mp3tag, fine.
I suppose whether it was me or iTunes at fault previously, the fact that it’s sorted is enough.
Unlike some, I have no problem with iTunes. If Sonos would start supporting 24/96 files, I’d be even happier.
Media Monkey has very good tag management and editing capabilities.
Yes I keep meaning to make the change.
I discovered recently that the latest smart phones won’t take an SD card which in incredibly annoying as I was planning to go that route for mobile music in future. So I’ll just stay with my old J6 for now which has a decent SD.
The new phones do tend to have a lot more memory on board as shipped, but yes it would be nicer if the memory was expandable. Also handier to just swap a card full of choons for another you Prepared Earlier than to delete and replace what’s in the phone memory. You could even carry a selection of cards with the phone. Music card, podcast card, audiobook card …
I have a 1TB card which seems to be more than enough for everything. And musicolet, which is a free standalone music player.
Yes I took your advice on Musicolet which I now use too. Really good. I’m going to upgrade my card now I have decided to stay on my existing phone.
Wise move. Only people with snowflake ears – like fentonsteve – feel the need to have a separate box for their music.
I await the development of the FiioPhone with bated breath…
Simples – I don’t have a phone.
What I would like is a small portable device, possibly Raspberry Pi-based and fag packet-sized or even smaller, that could live in my pocket and connect to Bluetooth earbuds, car stereo etc. and that any device with a web browser could log onto to select what to listen to.