iPod nation

[Who Shot Sam?]

You can get the covers on the Internet if iTunes doesn't do it for you. I don't know how to do it, but I know it can be done.

Yeah I've done that. Just find the cover image somewhere, select the album or tracks you want it to apply to and drag it into the artwork window.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Is it that simple? I have a feeling that hasn't worked for me in the past. Will check it out again.

[Mr. Average]

Initially I was embarrassed to admit it, but I find that there are too many occasions with my IPOD that I cannot select and artist or an album...related to my distractable personality disorder (softball), but I start listening to SD AJA and hear Steve Gadd who doesn't sound anything like Chester Thompson but inspires me to switch to Weather report Black Market which is so moving I can't wait to hear Ritchie Hayward of Little Feat play Teenage Nervous Breakdown which pales to Pete's drumming on Lipstick Vogue...so I get really confused and want to hear it all.

So I select the shuffle feature more than I would admit, but it is a great thrill to hear something from "The Wild, the Innocent" or Billy Cobham's "Spectrum" followed by a bit of elvis with Mariam McPartland "Piano Jazz" that would not have normally selected. There is something cosmic and seemingly unrandom about the random ordering, as if the IPOD KNOWs what I want to hear. Of course, I have the whole thing filled with my favorite music of the last 35 years, so it is no surprise that most of the tunes are gonna tickle my cochlea and stimlate my basilar membranes (I said "Cochlea"), but it is still great fun to grab hold of something served up by shuffle and then listen to the recording in it's entirely. It keeps me honest during these lean, tax times when I don' t have the case to keep building my collection.

There is one thing that I really must see before I die, and that is WSS's music collection "annex", because there is no way that he can keep all his music in a nromal sized abode. The rock and roll equivalent to the Nixon Library, I would imagine.

[cigarandyak]

Totally agree. I bought the 80 GB and it is well worth the $50. Mine has become a little slow though

[Otis Westinghouse]

I can't imagine life without it now. Have been furiously ripping and adding CDs all weekend. All of my Lloyd Cole CDs now there. I've ditched most of the bootlegs apart from a chosen few (e.g. a seriously good recording of Bowie in Boston in Nov '74, by miles the best recording I've heard of the 'soul tour' ones when he was adding Young Americans numbers on a regular basis and funking up things elsewhere).

My only gripes really are with the seeming incompatibility with iTunes. As posted before, I just don't get why if an artist is named in the standard way on iTunes, it doesn't appear under the artist listing on the iPod. have tried retyping and other things, pointless. Very annoying. Also annoying is the tendency to put non-official things, i.e. bootlegs, on in alphabetical rather than the correct order. Even though I've got the order correct and synced from iTunes, it still reverts to alphabetical when played. Really annoying as you can't then appreciate the bootlegs correctly. haven't sought answers to these elsewhere yet, but any help gratefully received.

[miss buenos aires]

Otis--if you have a bootleg recording, try adding track numbers in the information section. Alphabetical, I think, is the default when there are no track numbers.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Bless you! God these things so often have such an easy solution. A little more time looking at the Info and I might have worked that out, but it doesn't come easily! I'd never noticed that track listing info. It's also helped me sort out the other problem. I had looked at the Info there and could see artist entered in the correct way, but the crucial factor seems to be unchecking the 'part of compilation' box. Do that and it recognises it in its own right. Doesn't seem to matter if you leave it as '2 of 15' (i.e. the compilation track number) in this instance.

So now I have hours and hours of importing 80+ compilation CDs from over the years, entering the album info for each track, meaning insane amounts of cover artwork and albums listed! And I can enjoy gigs in their correct order! All is well in the world, well the iPod nation, anyway.

Thanks for your help.

[miss buenos aires]

There are probably better places on the Internet to post this cry for help, but: my iPod is refusing to sync up! It is driving me crazy because it claims to be syncing, and then I unhook it and try to find the last few albums I loaded onto my computer (yes, including Momofuku), and it's just got the same old stuff... This makes me very sad. Any suggestions?

[Otis Westinghouse]

Disaster! Try an upgrade of iTunes if you don't have latest? Um, dunno really. What a bummer. I had all sorts of probs with my iPod wanting USB 2.0 and my Mac Mini being 1, wouldn't sync, etc., but then I used my son's old iPod dock and it was all OK. If you haven't made any changes to anything, then it seems to be a software hitch. Resetting may be the only option, though that would, I guess, mean starting again with your iPod, unless you have it all backed up.

[martinfoyle]

Indeed, sounds grim. Still if you're facing the prospect of starting again, get a Cowon. And rip you're stuff onto an external hard drive and transfer to the player.

[ice nine]

As a Chanukah/Christmas/Kwanza/New Year's gift I got an iPod Classic. So far I'm having no trouble, but I only have a few hundred songs on there. I thought it would be frustrating to sync up, but as soon as I connect the iPod to the computer it is instantaneous. If only it didn't take so long for the importing process onto the computer. I take the bus into work in the morning and I don't feel like listening to music in the morning. I must look demented when I break out in laughter on the bus as I listen to the Ricky Gervis/Stephen ???/Kyle Pilkinton podcast. That bit about sending a monkey up into space is hilarious....and sending the goat to Africa.