shadowrelm wrote:
i-pod is kind of like windows operating system. propriatary. anything you put on it can only be transfered to another devise that is also regestered to the same user. you cant transfer from i-pod to i-pod unless both are regestered to you, you cant even copy from i-pod to a computer unless the computer has the regestered softwear that came with the i-pod.
Absolutely false. Unless they've made major changes to how Ipods work since I got mine (a 60GB model. Which btw is ridiculously *huge* in terms of music space).
First off, while they make it "difficult" to copy songs from an Ipod to a computer, it's not impossible. In fact, it's only slightly harder then copying songs using other mp3 players.
You are aware that you don't have to use the Itunes gui to access an Ipod, right? It also mounts as a drive on your PC. From there, you can browse into the area on the Ipod where your music is stored and copy as many songs as you want off. The only "catch" is that songs that were not imported on the PC you're on will not show up with a song name as the file name. It'll have an Ipod name, which will be a series of letters (mine were 4 characters, but I imagine it just orders them and increases the number based on the number of songs).
There is *nothing* to prevent you from simply copying that to your desktop or any other folder, just as you'd copy any other file. In fact, when you do that, you can then restart Itunes by double clicking on the song you just copied and it'll automatically appear in your Itunes library on the system. Not only that, but it'll appear with the correct song name and album information as well...
Transferring songs and playlists to your Ipod is trivially easy and done right from the Itunes gui. Transferring songs to any other computer is just a matter of copying files. I know this is true because I
just tested it 5 minutes ago. Some friends of mine dumped 700 someodd songs onto my Ipod when we were planning a trip to Vegas (it's a pretty decent drive). Used the Ipod as our music source for the entire trip up and back and had zero problems. Just now, I used the method I mentioned above to transfer a few songs from the Ipod onto my computer here at work (which has the installation of Itunes I have, and has no connection in any way to my friend's computer).
I'm as much of a technophile as anyone, and that usually means I prefer using "generic" systems to do things, since they usually don't try to muck with the user doing what he wants. But in the case of the Ipod, the end user stuff they've added just makes the product easier to use in the "normal mode". You're still free to copy files manually just like you'd do with any other generic MP3 player, with all the capability that entails. You just have to be capable of the arduous task of browsing through a file system and clicking and dragging files...