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Playing in iTunes from an iPod

mainstreetmark

mainstreetmark

macrumors 68020
Original poster
May 7, 2003
2,228
293
Saint Augustine, FL
Well, I finally joined the iPod revolution. A nice, new 40giger.

I'm somewhat surprised to see that when an iPod is plugged in, the music is visible, but not playable.

I would have very much expected to be able to go to one of my other Macs and plug in the iPod and play the music from it, as if it were a musical source like the other macs themselves are.

Is this simply not the case? Does being with one of the other macs require that i disconnect it from the local stereo and connect it to the iPod? Hmm... i'm still learning.
 
If its pprotected ACC (or is it AAC files?) you must validate the Mac you are trying to play them on....
 
From my understanding you cannot share the songs on the ipod through filesharing in itunes. You can play the songs from the ipod in itunes when you have the ipod physically connected to that machine, I do it all the time, when I take it to other computers. I don't know what you are doing wrong, but when I highlight my ipod in itunes all my songs are playable.
 

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Yeah, you might have to turn off automatic updating, there is the icon at the bottom right of ipods capicity meter that looks like an ipod. Click on it to open the preferences and switch from automatic to manual updating, you can also enable firewire disk usage in this panel.
 
Apparently, this Manual vs Automatic thing is remembered on the iPod. My main computer, the master of the iPod, has all my songs on it and I like the auto-update thing.

When I go to another computer with it, it still won't let me play the stuff on the iPod, unless I switch it back to manual.

That's kind of weird, but since it lets me do what i want, it's not too terrible. The playcounts update when it's played, so it gets the job done. I would have expected the Auto/Manual setting to be computer specific.
 
The reason it does that is because: When you set up your computer for auto-sync, it becomes attached to that particular computer and can't be used on any other computer while still in auto-sync mode. And since it's in auto-sync with it's main computer, there's no reason to allow playback through the iPod while connected, because your computer would already have every song on the iPod as well, because they're synced.

The reason you can't connect it to another computer while set in auto-sync mode is because it's set up to automatically update the playlists and library to the computer it's connected to. When you plug it into another computer, it asks you if you want to make this new computer the main computer before it starts to auto-sync with a new computer, thus erasing anything currently on it.
 
Yeah, i see that's how it works, but I would have expected something like this:

- When autosync'd to the main computer, the behavior is now as expected. You cannot play or modify the contents because, as you've said, that would be redundant.

- When plugged into another computer that it is not autosyncing with, it would make sense to me to be able to at least play the music on it. The iPod would esentially function just like a rendevous'd iTunes music source from another computer - you can play from it, but you cannot modify it. However, I find that you cannot even play from it. If the iPod thinks it's supposed to autosync with some other computer, it is essenitally nothing more than a firewire drive with no accessible music. (And, if you turn Firewire drive ability off, it becomes nothing more than a large tic tac)
 
While I understand your point, the inherent problem is that the preferences on the iPod are set to auto-sync, which means that it's expecting you to want to sync with a computer when it's connected.

Perhaps it just needs a new option that lets you set a master computer that doesn't change unless specified by the user, and then the iPod will have playback with any computer other than the main one, but for now, you just have to switch it to manual, then back to auto when you get home.
 
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