New User Help With Mp3 Player And External Hd!!

[naturaljane]

Hi! as I state above I am a new user, I'm talking green....I just received my Imac yesterday and took out my old HP. Now you know how green I really am. Anyway I need help with two different issues. First; I have an external drive (Seagate) that stores all of our music that was downloaded mostly from limewire for windows is there anyway to connect this to the Imac? Or do I pretty much have to keep it connected to the pc. There are a lot of songs on that drive and I would love to access it from the mac if possible.
Ok new issue I downloaded limewire for Mac and even got it to work...Wow! Now for the BIG issue, I connected my Sony Walkman mp3 to the imac and it was recognized (even thought it didn't show up in the list of acceptable mp3 players) It shows up on the desk top but I can't do anything with it. Is it possible to put music on it from the Imac? I looked and looked but everything I have tried has failed. Oh by the way I did download Windows media player for mac and the program you use to unzip it but that didn't work either. I only ended up with a screen that says Windows media player version 9 but that's it, it has no command prompts or any kind of folders...I probably did it wrong but for the life of me I can't figure out what. I also downloaded flip4mac but can't figure it out, what else is new....
I know all of this is part of beginner speech, I was so darn frustrated I almost packed it up to send it back. You see I've been using pc's for ummmm lets just a long, long time, but I love the Imac and there are a lot of things I want to do with it so I will plug a long and hopefully become well versed in mac talk.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful day
Jane

 

[Muncher]

Hi! as I state above I am a new user, I'm talking green....I just received my Imac yesterday and took out my old HP. Now you know how green I really am. Anyway I need help with two different issues. First; I have an external drive (Seagate) that stores all of our music that was downloaded mostly from limewire for windows is there anyway to connect this to the Imac? Or do I pretty much have to keep it connected to the pc.

That depends on what you did with the drive when you first got it. You should be able to read the music off it, but you might not be able to put new music on. Also, you're not supposed to explicitly state you use limewire and the like on these forums IIRC. Besides, I wouldn't use limewire anyway.

There are a lot of songs on that drive and I would love to access it from the mac if possible.
Ok new issue I downloaded limewire for Mac and even got it to work...Wow! Now for the BIG issue, I connected my Sony Walkman mp3 to the imac and it was recognized (even thought it didn't show up in the list of acceptable mp3 players) It shows up on the desk top but I can't do anything with it. Is it possible to put music on it from the Imac? I looked and looked but everything I have tried has failed. Oh by the way I did download Windows media player for mac and the program you use to unzip it but that didn't work either. I only ended up with a screen that says Windows media player version 9 but that's it, it has no command prompts or any kind of folders...I probably did it wrong but for the life of me I can't figure out what. I also downloaded flip4mac but can't figure it out, what else is new....
I know all of this is part of beginner speech, I was so darn frustrated I almost packed it up to send it back. You see I've been using pc's for ummmm lets just a long, long time, but I love the Imac and there are a lot of things I want to do with it so I will plug a long and hopefully become well versed in mac talk.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful day
Jane

One thing at a time . If the mp3 player shows up on the desktop, you should be able to drag music from itunes onto that icon, and it will be copied, assuming the mp3 player doesn't need any extra software to work.

WMP for mac? eww... . Just use itunes/quicklook. For quick look, select a movie, and press space. TO go full screen, there's a button with two arrows at the bottom of the window. Flip4mac showed up in on the desktop looking like a flash drive, didn't it? That's called mounting. When it appears like that, double click to open it, then it may tell you to run whatever is inside or to drag it into your applications folder, then run it. .dmg files are a very common way to distribute mac apps and other stuff mac related.

It's a headache, we all went through it . Just remember, you're coming from windows where everything is 10x as complicated as it needs to be. On a mac, if you think you can do something (i.e. drag a picture from online to your desktop to save it), then you probably can.

Good luck
Muncher

 

[naturaljane]

Sorry Muncher!!

Sorry Muncher for stating that!!! Anyway Ok so let me ask you this. Is there an external HD out there that can talk to both Mac and PC? Or am I mixing apples with oranges. Also what is an affordable good External hard drive for Mac?
Ok I did get one song onto the mp3 player. Yeah Me! But I can't figure out how to do an entire play list!!! I am sorry I am such a pain. I know it's just a learning curve but I feel so helpless and frustrated! Thanks for your help and have a great 4th and weekend!
Jane

 

[old-wiz]

As far as an external HD drive connection to a Mac, it is not difficult. For a USB connected drive the primary differenceis the file system - Mac uses OS/x journaled, where the windows disks use FAT or NTFS. Macs can easily read FAT disks, and I have a couple of usb key drives which I can swap back and forth mac-windows. If you're going to use the drive exclusively on the Mac, then you can copy the data off and re-format it for OS/X. Firewire drives are pretty much exclusive to Macs, so they come formatted for OS/x, which drives people nuts when they buy a firewire drive for windows and it appears there is no file system on it since windows doesn't recognize th file system.

I'm not familiar with the details of the mp3 players. If it shows up on the desktop you could right click on it and do a "get info" which might lead to a clue.

 

[Muncher]

As far as an external HD drive connection to a Mac, it is not difficult. For a USB connected drive the primary differenceis the file system - Mac uses OS/x journaled, where the windows disks use FAT or NTFS. Macs can easily read FAT disks, and I have a couple of usb key drives which I can swap back and forth mac-windows. If you're going to use the drive exclusively on the Mac, then you can copy the data off and re-format it for OS/X. Firewire drives are pretty much exclusive to Macs, so they come formatted for OS/x, which drives people nuts when they buy a firewire drive for windows and it appears there is no file system on it since windows doesn't recognize th file system.

I'm not familiar with the details of the mp3 players. If it shows up on the desktop you could right click on it and do a "get info" which might lead to a clue.

This is right.

Sorry Muncher for stating that!!!

Don't apologize to me, I can't ban you. But you're new here, so no problem. For future reference, just avoid talking directly about that stuff. "I know this guy..." and so on .

Anyway Ok so let me ask you this. Is there an external HD out there that can talk to both Mac and PC? Or am I mixing apples with oranges. Also what is an affordable good External hard drive for Mac?
Ok I did get one song onto the mp3 player. Yeah Me! But I can't figure out how to do an entire play list!!! I am sorry I am such a pain. I know it's just a learning curve but I feel so helpless and frustrated! Thanks for your help and have a great 4th and weekend!
Jane

Almost any external hard drive will work with a mac. The problem is file systems, the way your mac will store the (music I assume) on the drive. If you can, format the hard drive to FAT or FAT32. You should be able to find tutorials on how to do just that by googling. Those two will work with pcs and macs.

You can copy albums by setting itunes to cover flow mode, and dragging the picture of the album to the disc. Happy 4th!