iPod 5g ipod/itunes cd download help needed

[rwh63]

hello,

i've been reading this forum for several months now. i purchased a 13" macbook pro in june 2010, and have recently picked up a refurbished 5g ipod nano. i created an itunes account, and have been downloading about a hundred albums so far over the last several days. i have a number of questions/observations which i hope experienced people can comment on.

here goes:

1) superdrive is loud, sometimes shudders. sometimes when i insert a cd for copying, itunes does not respond; i need to eject and reinstall.

2) downloading cd issues:

- double cds do not combine into one on their own. can't drag and drop.
e.g. beatles white album, dylan blonde on blonde, etc.

- sometimes an album will download into 2 or 3 albums,
containing one or more songs each. can't easily recombine into one.
sometimes if a song is authored by more than one person, it will
split off by itself. sometimes going in and eliminating the additional
artist(s) will kick the song back into the original album, sometimes
not.

3) album art

- right now i'm getting most of my album art from itunes. i've read that
there are other options. some of the albums do not have covers
available from itunes(all of the beatles, plus a fair number of others).
i did experiment with amazon art, but had bad results. i followed their
instructions, chose the cover and played the album, but the cover
went to the wrong cd (sometime the wrong artist!). i couldn't
seem to delete the art, so i had to delete the album and re-load.
has to be a better way to do that!

what did i do wrong, and are there other ways of downloading cover
art and saving them in a permanent folder, then drop and drag
onto the generic album spot in itunes? esp. good if i want to
periodically change the album cover into different versions.

- is there a way of permanently attaching the covers, so if i backup
the collection, it will all transfer as one?

ipod questions:

- when synching to the ipod to download new albums, will new cover art
refresh automatically, and changes to albums already on the
ipod (song additions/subtractions)?

- can i delete songs or albums right on the ipod?


is there an excellent ipod/itunes tutorial on this site?


thanks for the assistance.

 

[Googlyhead]

hello,

//looks at long list of questions and runs.

 

[Googlyhead]

1) superdrive is loud, sometimes shudders. sometimes when i insert a cd for copying, itunes does not respond; i need to eject and reinstall.

Reinstall? Hoping you mean re-insert.

Could be a dirty CD, dirty lens etc.
Regarding the itunes copying, there is an option to enable a slower error check method in the prefs. try that.

3) album art

so i had to delete the album and re-load.
has to be a better way to do that!

Get info on song / album, there's an 'artwork' tab where you can delete and rearrange display order.

- when synching to the ipod to download new albums, will new cover art
refresh automatically, and changes to albums already on the
ipod (song additions/subtractions)?

Works like this AFAIK. any changes are transferred.

- can i delete songs or albums right on the ipod?

Not AFAIK.

 

[rwh63]

alright, i've been making some progress. super drive is still occasionally loud, but i think that is a normal complaint. got most of the double albums to combine by removing (disc 1 or 2), or other descrepancies between the two discs. went to amazon and dragged covers to each discs info artwork box.
still trying to figure out why some albums split and create album pieces.

synching to the ipod with about 1500 songs took some hours; thought it would be a quick transfer.

is there a way to password secure ones music collection on the macbook and ipod?

should i backup or copy my music collection/best ways?

thx