iPod on a PC and Mac?

[DwightSchrute]

So my cousin just got a job as a teacher and all the teachers in her school got Macbooks (talk about being lucky). Anyways she's currently using a PC and tried to hook her iPod up to her Macbook and it didn't work.

I think I rememebr reading somewhere that you have to reformat it or something but I wasn't sure and I knew someone here would know.

The other quesiton which is also important to me as I've got over 16GB of music on iTunes on my PC and I've got a Macbook in the mail is that if you do have to reformat the iPod to work on the Mac can I still save all the data to my iPod and transfer it to my Mac or do I need some sort of cable to do that? Thanks

 

[GilGrissom]

So my cousin just got a job as a teacher and all the teachers in her school got Macbooks (talk about being lucky). Anyways she's currently using a PC and tried to hook her iPod up to her Macbook and it didn't work.

I think I rememebr reading somewhere that you have to reformat it or something but I wasn't sure and I knew someone here would know.

The other quesiton which is also important to me as I've got over 16GB of music on iTunes on my PC and I've got a Macbook in the mail is that if you do have to reformat the iPod to work on the Mac can I still save all the data to my iPod and transfer it to my Mac or do I need some sort of cable to do that? Thanks

To answer your first question, yes the iPod will need to be reformatted into Mac format for iTunes to use it properly (this should be fairly straight forward as iTunes should do it all for you when you plug in the iPod and tell it to.

Appologies if I don't fully answer your second question, I'm just going by what I understand by it. I 'think' that Windows formatted iPods are still detected and mountable by OS X, so you can still use it as a portable hard drive to transfer files across, and this should work the other way round if the iPod was in Mac format and needed to be plugged into Windows, although on that last point I may be wrong (as my Windows lappy cannot detect my OS X formatted USB hard drive at all!).

Sorry if that's a little useless and cryptic!

 

[nicque]

i've got my ipod to get music from an imac g4 (not mine) when my ipod is formatted to a pc, i used the usb instead of the firewire.

 

[I'mAMac]

If she has the music in her library then its no problem. If the music is only on her ipod than reformatting it will require full deletion of the music. There is a way to get around that http://www.playlistmag.com/help/2005/01/2waystreet/ scroll down a bit. There are directions for both windows and mac.

 

[PerfectlyFlawed]

if its PC formatted you can use it with PC or Mac with the only problem is if there is an ipod software update you can only update with a PC, if you have it Mac formatted you can't use it with a PC. but there is a program Macdrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/
that you install on a PC that will let you use it with a PC.

 

[DwightSchrute]

Thanks for the help. It looks like maybe the problem was that she didn't have any music in her library on her Macbook.