iLounge

Q: What are the best speakers to use with my iPod? (15, 76-79, and 90-92)

Q: What are the best headphones to use with my iPod? (10, 72-75, and 90-92)

Q: I really want to get a nice case for my iPod. Do you have any suggestions? (36-37, 54-67, and 90-92)

Q: How can I connect my iPod to my car stereo? (14, 32-35, 68-71, and 90-92)

Q: Are there any batteries that I can use to extend my iPod's battery life? (82-83 and 90-92)

A: Answers to these and many other questions can be found in two places. Our Free iPod Book 3.3 provides a complete report card to all of the iPod accessories we've reviewed as of summer 2007, as well as over 125 iTunes and iPod tips & tricks. Further, our new 2008 iPod & iPhone Buyers' Guide has accessory tutorials at the page numbers listed in parentheses above. These and other publications in our Library are free downloads, developed by the editors of iLounge!

Q:

I have over 10,000 songs in iTunes, and have recently replaced my 60 GB iPod with an 8 GB iPod nano. I would like to have iTunes do a random autofill when I sync my nano. iTunes did build a random playlist but won’t ever change the contents of the playlist, it is always the same. Is there a way to have different songs without dragging them myself?

- Jim

This is most definitely possible through the use of one of iTunes’ more powerful features, “Smart Playlists.”

As you’ve observed, iTunes itself will offer to select content for your iPod in the event that your library is larger than the capacity of your iPod. Unfortunately, it does this through creating a standard playlist and randomly filling it with content. Since a standard playlist is used, this content remains static unless you manually update the tracks listed within.

On the other hand, iTunes supports a feature called “Smart Playlists” that allows you to build playlists in your iTunes library based on specified criteria that can be found within the tags of each song. In a new iTunes library, you will normally see some default Smart Playlists that have already been created for you, and you can edit these to get an idea of what sort of options are available. Smart Playlists are identified in iTunes by a purple icon with a gear on it.

You can easily create additional Smart Playlists and select these for synchronization to your iPod nano either instead of, or in addition to the standard playlist that iTunes builds for you automatically.

Unfortunately, while there’s no way to do this completely at random, certain criteria can be set in your Smart Playlist to ensure that iTunes will at least keep relatively fresh and relevant content loaded onto your iPod. This is best done based on criteria like the following:

• Date Added: The date the track was added to the iTunes library (not necessarily the date added to the iPod)
• Last Played: The date the track was last played in iTunes or on any iPod that is automatically synced with this library.
• Last Skipped: The date the track was last skipped in iTunes or on any iPod that is automatically synced with this library. A track is considered “Skipped” when the “Next Track” button is used to skip to the next track between 2 and 30 seconds into the track. Selecting a new track in iTunes or on the iPod does not increment this counter—only hitting the “Next Track” button. Also note that the tracking of this is only supported on the iPod nano and 5G iPod models.
• Play Count: The number of times a track has been played through to the end, either in iTunes or on any iPod that is automatically synced with this library.
• My Rating: The rating for a track, from 0 through 5 stars.

The information from playing, skipping, or rating tracks on the iPod (or the iPhone or Apple TV for that matter) is automatically transferred back to the iTunes library from any iPod that is automatically synced to that library, and can be viewed within iTunes by displaying the appropriate columns.

By combining these criteria, you can easily create a playlist that contains the content that you wish to have loaded onto your iPod, and you can even limit each playlist to a maximum number of items, duration or size.

To create a new Smart Playlist, you simply choose New Smart Playlist from the File menu in iTunes. Alternatively, you can click on the Create a Playlist button found in the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window while holding down the SHIFT key (Windows) or OPT key (Mac)—you will see the button change from a plus sign to a gear symbol, and clicking on it while continuing to hold the SHIFT/OPT key will create a Smart Playlist instead of a standard playlist.

When creating a Smart Playlist, you will be presented with a dialog box, which will allow you to specify the criteria for which tracks should be included in your Smart Playlist. There are obviously many possible options that can be used to set criteria for Smart Playlists, depending upon your own library and preferred criteria.

The following are some examples of Smart Playlists that may provide a useful starting point:

• Select 1GB worth of tracks, at random, that have not been played in 7 days, not been skipped in 5, and are rated between 3 and 5 stars:
  
• Select 1GB worth of tracks from the “Rock” genre, grouped by artist, that have never been played and have not been skipped in the past three days:
  
• Select 60 minutes worth of music that has been added to your iTunes library in the past two weeks, with the least recently added tracks being given priority:
  
• Select 15 tracks from the Jazz or Blues genre, grouped by album:

Note that you can also use other playlists as criteria within a Smart Playlist. These other playlists can be either standard playlists or other Smart Playlists, and this can be a very useful way of specifying more complex and/or criteria, or selecting a limited number of tracks from a larger playlist.

• Select all tracks in the “JDH Mix” standard playlist that have not been skipped in the past two days:
  
• Select 60 minutes worth of music from the “Workout” playlist, with the least recently played tracks being given priority:

Note that the “Limit to” settings can be a very useful way of limiting the content of a Smart Playlist to the storage of your iPod nano, and can even be combined across several Smart Playlists, so you could for example have four individual Smart Playlists that each select 2 GB of content, and then sync them all to your 8 GB iPod nano.

To specify selected playlists for synchronization, simply connect your iPod nano and select it in the iTunes source list on the left side of your iTunes window. From the “Music” tab, simply choose the playlists that you wish to have synchronized to your iPod. Only tracks in these playlists will be transferred to the iPod, and as tracks are removed from these playlists (either manually from a standard playlist or because they no longer meet the criteria for a Smart Playlist), they will also be removed from the iPod on the next synchronization.

Therefore, if you had a Smart Playlist that only includes tracks you haven’t listened to in the past week, and this is the only playlist you’re syncing to your iPod, then as you listen to music on your iPod, it will be automatically removed during the next synchronization, and will be placed back on after a week of not having been listened to.

For more information and Smart Playlist ideas, be sure to check out our iLounge Discussion Forums, which contain a number of threads discussing Smart Playlist ideas, such as the thread Your Smart Playlist Ideas.

I tried to move my music folder, along with my iTunes library, to an external hard drive because my internal drive was filling up quickly. Initially iTunes impressively recognised and found the new location, however later after the same external hard drive had to be disconnected and reconnected, I couldn’t even open iTunes, and got a message stating that “The folder iTunes cannot be found or created and is required.”

In an effort to reverse the action I tried to put things back but was unable to recreate my original music folder and it seems I lost it somehow or it got deleted. I went to Apple support: I installed Tweak UI from Microsoft as was suggested, since I’m using a PC and XP, and when it instructed me to go to my special folders to find my music folder, my music folder wasn’t there on the list, even though I recreated one in my documents folder.

I’m losing my mind with this and can’t believe Apple has made this process so difficult, I’m ready to toss my iPod and go with a different software and hardware system. I have spent over $2000- buying music from iTunes, and I’m very angry and upset about this. Help Guys!

- Mykola

How this is actually handled depends largely on what version of iTunes you are using. By default on Windows XP, iTunes expects to find its library database in the “My Music” folder of whichever user is presently logged on to the system. In previous versions of iTunes, there was no way to change this behavior, and you therefore needed to use the Microsoft TweakUI tool to change the location of the “My Music” folder itself at an operating system level. By telling Windows itself to put the “My Music” folder somewhere else, iTunes would happily use this new location.

Fortunately, in iTunes 7, the situation has become much simpler. You can now tell iTunes to either create or use a new iTunes library database simply by holding down the SHIFT key while starting iTunes. iTunes will present you with the following dialog box:

You can then either click “Create Library” to create a new iTunes library entirely, or “Choose Library” to point iTunes to the location of your existing library database folder.

Note that none of this affects where iTunes stores your content, but only the library database itself (and its related files). The location for your iTunes content such as music and video files, is set in your iTunes preferences under the Advanced tab:

This location defaults to a folder called “iTunes Music” which is stored under your iTunes library database folder, but you can specify any location you like for it.

Generally, unless you plan on using your iTunes library on more than one computer, the best option is to actually leave the iTunes library database in its default location, and simply specify an alternative location for your iTunes Music Folder in the iTunes Preferences. Since it is the iTunes content in the iTunes Music Folder that accounts for most of your library storage, generally moving this to an external hard drive is all that is necessary.

In terms of this specific problem, if the iTunes library database is still on the external hard drive, then your simplest option is to restart iTunes while holding down the SHIFT key, and then use the “Choose Library” button to point iTunes to the location of your library database on the external hard drive. Using the TweakUI tool is not necessary unless you’re using a version of iTunes prior to v7, and in fact can complicate things in this case. The other thing to keep in mind is that TweakUI will not just change the location of the “My Music” folder, but will in fact move it to the new location, which would explain why you are no longer seeing it under the “My Documents” folder on your computer, as it will now be pointing to whatever path you set it to in TweakUI.

Unless you change the path using the method above, iTunes will simply look for a folder called “iTunes” in this new location and expect to find its library database there.

For more assistance with this problem, you may want to check into our iLounge Discussion Forums and consider posting a thread in there for help with your specific problem.

My iTunes library is on an external hard drive attached to my Windows XP laptop. Once in a while, I forget to turn on the external hard drive before launching iTunes. If I download a music track or podcast from the iTunes store, iTunes changes the location of my default iTunes directory to a folder inside My Documents on my laptop’s [internal] C:\ hard drive. Then, iTunes cannot find things stored in the iTunes folder of the external drive.

So, I go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced and change the iTunes music folder location back to the folder on the external drive. The problem is that some things remain in the iTunes folder of My Documents on the laptop’s internal hard drive, even after I check “Keep iTunes Music Folder organized”.

Ideally, I would always remember to turn on the external hard drive before opening iTunes. But I don’t. Seems like there should be another way, though, to prevent the inconvenience I’m experiencing.

I’d be grateful for any suggestions.

- Ron

iTunes checks for your defined “iTunes Music Folder” path when you first start iTunes, so as you’ve observed, if your external hard drive isn’t connected at that time, this path will revert back to the default location, under your “My Music” folder.

The good news, however, is that if you shut down iTunes, connect the external hard drive and then restart iTunes, it should pick up the external path again as its default, so you should not need to reset it manually, unless you want to keep iTunes running for some reason.

If you are using your iTunes library while the external hard drive is disconnected, either because you forget to connect it, or you are using a laptop computer away from home, any newly-imported or downloaded tracks will go to the default location, since the external hard drive cannot be found. These tracks will remain in this location, and be referenced from there, even after you’ve reconnected the external hard drive. Although the “Keep Music Folder organized” setting is turned on, this only applies to tracks that are within the iTunes Music Folder, as currently defined in your preferences. Once you switch this location to the external hard drive, iTunes considers the tracks that are in the old location on your C: drive to be outside of its control, and will therefore not attempt to organize these tracks in any way.

The solution is actually relatively simple:  Use the Consolidate Library action, which can be found on the iTunes Advanced menu. This handy function will take all of your iTunes content that is stored outside of your iTunes Music Folder and copy it into the iTunes folder. So, after connecting your external hard drive and confirming that that path in iTunes is correctly set, simply select Consolidate Library and iTunes will take care of the rest.

Note that this feature merely makes a copy of your media content, rather than moving it to the external hard drive, so if you want to later remove it from your C: drive, you are going to have to do this manually. This is because iTunes tends to err on the side of caution when dealing with any media files that are not contained within its iTunes Music Folder—it will never move or delete any files that are not under its direct control.

Interestingly, this feature can actually be made to work very effectively once you understand it, and can be particularly useful for portable or laptop use. Since the tracks remain in their original location after the Consolidate Library function has been run, and since iTunes reverts to this path when the external hard drive isn’t connected, this can be a very useful way to keep a subset of your library on your laptop computer for use when traveling, while still maintaining a master copy of the entire iTunes library on the external hard drive. Simply manually copy some tracks from your external hard drive to your local hard drive, being careful to preserve the file/folder structure, and these tracks will be available even when the external drive is disconnected. When importing or downloading music away from home, simply run the Consolidate Library function when you return to your desk and connect the external hard drive, and any new tracks you’ve added while you are away will be copied to the external hard drive.

I bought an iPod nano for my young daughter, and tried to load songs onto it. The problem is that the Apple info says that when you’ve inserted a CD the album title and song titles should be automatically culled from the Internet, and that it’s only a matter of clicking on an icon for this to happen. This isn’t working for me, however, and I’m finding myself having to manually type everything in. I assume that I must be doing something wrong, but have gone over the procedures several times without finding the answer.

- Anonymous

iTunes normally retrieves track information for an inserted CD from the Gracenote CD Database, or CDDB. As you’ve observed, this should happen automatically as soon as you insert a new CD into your computer. If this is not happening, you can try to initiate this search manually by choosing Get CD Track Names from the Advanced menu.

Naturally, you do need to be connected to the Internet for this to work, so if you are using a connection that is not always-on, such as a dial-up connection, you will need to ensure that this connection is active before you do this, otherwise iTunes won’t be able to contact the CDDB service.

If you are still having problems, even after initiating the connection manually and confirming that you are connected to the Internet, the next thing you should check is any firewall software that may be installed on your computer that may be preventing iTunes from making this outbound connection. Many firewall applications prevent outbound connections from applications on your computer without express authorization, to prevent adware or spyware from initiating connections. If this is the case, you may need to add iTunes to a list of authorized applications within your firewall application.

Other software that you may have installed that uses the CDDB service can also interfere with iTunes, since it uses third-party libraries to perform this function, and these libraries sometimes conflict with other applications. If you have a third-party CD ripping or burning application on your computer these can sometimes get in the way, particularly if they also provide CDDB track lookup services. Uninstalling these applications and then uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes will often solve this problem, by ensuring that iTunes is able to install and register its own set of CDDB libraries.

Is there any way to get my iPod and Apple TV to group tracks by different artists under one ‘album artist’ name? After all, that’s the point of the ‘album artist’ field!

I know I could group these tracks as a Compilation, but I don’t want to list all these albums under “Various Artists,” I want them listed by the artist credited on the album.

- T.F.

Unfortunately, the “Album Artist” field is not presently used outside of iTunes itself. On the iPod and Apple TV, tracks continue to be sorted by “Artist” rather than “Album Artist.”

The only workaround for this is to actually set the artist field to the album artist, and then use another track field, such as the comments, to store the specific artist information. This will unfortunately prevent you from browsing for that particular artist directly, as well as limiting your search options on the iPod and within iTunes.

One alternative field that you might be able to use for this purpose, if you’re not using it already, is the “Composer” field. The Composer field is normally reserved for composers, but if you’re not filling this information into your tracks, can just as easily be used for featured artists or specific artist information. This field can be browsed directly through the Music, Composers menu on the iPod, and is included in searches within iTunes (although not on the iPod itself, unfortunately).

How do I use my iPod as a removable drive on a PC?

- Russ

Using the iPod as a removable hard drive is actually quite simple—a connected iPod should always show up as a removable hard drive to any recent version of Windows or Mac OS X, regardless of whether iTunes is installed or not.

When connecting an iPod to a computer without iTunes installed, it will simply remain connected, presenting itself to the operating system as an external hard drive that can be accessed through the Windows Explorer or My Computer windows as a removable drive, with a drive letter assigned:

You can simply work with it as you would any other external hard drive on your computer. When you first open the iPod in Windows Explorer, you will see a number of pre-defined directories that are used by the iPod itself. You can create additional subdirectories, or store files right in the top-level (root) directory, but should avoid these other directories as they are used by the iPod for various functions, and it expects to find certain things in them. Note that you can place proper content into these directories, for example, text files in the Notes directory, or vCal files in the Calendars directory, and these will appear in the appropriate sections on the iPod itself.

When you’re doing working with it, you simply need to “Eject” it from your computer, either by right-clicking on it in Windows Explorer and choosing “Eject”, or clicking on the “Safely Remove USB Devices” option in the Windows System Tray (by the clock):

If you want to use your iPod as a removable drive on a PC that has iTunes installed on it and are using automatic synchronization to your iTunes library, you must ensure that you enable disk use for your particular iPod within iTunes. By default, when disk use is not enabled, iTunes will automatically eject the iPod following an automatic synchronization, which will not be particularly useful if you want it to remain mounted and accessible as a removable drive. Selecting the “Enable Disk Use” option in iTunes tells iTunes to leave that particular iPod connected until you eject it manually. In this case, an automatic synchronization will still occur each time you connect the iPod to your computer, but the iPod will remain connected after the synchronization completes.

After selecting “Enable Disk Use” iTunes will remind you that you must always eject your iPod manually, since it will not do this for you automatically any more:

Note that there’s nothing else particularly special about the “Enable Disk Use” option. As already discussed, the iPod will always show up as an external hard drive. “Enable Disk Use” simply prevents iTunes from automatically ejecting it after a synchronization completes. If you’re managing the content on your iPod manually, or you connect your iPod without starting iTunes (so the automatic synchronization doesn’t run), it will also remain connected to your computer and can be used as an external hard drive in the same way as above.

In fact, in manual mode, the “Enable Disk Use” option becomes enabled and grayed out, indicating that the iPod will essentially always be in “disk mode” when managing the content manually:

Note that if you’re planning on using your iPod on both a Mac and a PC, you will need to ensure that it’s either formatted for Windows use (Mac OS X can read a Windows-formatted hard disk), or you will need to install a software package such as MediaFour’s MacDrive to allow your Windows PC to read a Mac-formatted disk.

My iPod nano has been plugged in for over 12 hours and it still says “Do not Disconnect.” Can I disconnect it anyway?

- Jocelyn

As explained in the previous question above, the iPod should normally automatically eject after an automatic synchronization completes, except in the following situations:

• You have “Enable Disk Use” selected
• You have “Manually manage music and videos” selected
• Another application other than iTunes has files open on the iPod’s hard disk

If you are actually using manual mode to manage your iPod content (ie, via drag-and-drop), you must eject your iPod manually after you are done adding content to it—iTunes will not eject it automatically as it doesn’t know when you’re done with it. This can be done as described above if you’re using Windows, or by clicking the small “eject” symbol that appears to the right of the iPod in the iTunes source list.

On the other hand, if you’re using automatic synchronization, the iPod should be ejected automatically via iTunes. You can check to ensure that manual mode or disk use are not enabled by selecting your iPod from the source list in iTunes, and seeing if this options are selected on the “Summary” tab. If so, simply UNcheck them and click Apply. Your iPod will go through another automatic sync cycle, and then should automatically eject when it’s done.

If these options are not enabled, and you are still having problems with your iPod ejecting properly, you can try manually ejecting it by using one of the other methods described in the last question. If you’re using Windows, it should respond with a message indicating that you can now safely disconnect your iPod and the “Do not Disconnect” screen should disappear after a few seconds.

If this still fails to eject the iPod properly, you may want to see if any third-party applications that you are using, particularly anti-virus scanners or disk maintenance utilities, might have open files on the iPod itself. Since the iPod appears to the operating system as an external hard drive, it is possible for other applications to be accessing it, and the underlying operating system will not allow it to be ejected if this is the case.

As a last resort, shutting down or rebooting your computer should also allow the iPod to be safely disconnected.

Although in many cases you can get away with disconnecting the iPod while the “Do not Disconnect” screen is being shown, this is never a recommended course of action, as it can result in corruption of data on the iPod if there are still files being written to it. You should especially never disconnect the iPod while iTunes is actively synchronizing data to it, as this will almost certainly result in the iPod’s internal database becoming corrupted and possibly orphaned files being left on your iPod taking up space—a situation that can often only be corrected with a complete restore of your iPod to factory settings, erasing everything on it and reloading the content from your iTunes library.

Ask iLounge Archives:

10-30-09: Authorization problems with iPod touch, Changing Grid View background in iTunes, iTunes library and Music Folder are different sizes, Older iPods and firmware updates, Reconciling two different iTunes libraries, Syncing multiple devices to one iTunes library

10-23-09: Using a laptop with an iTunes library on an external hard drive, Transferring YouTube videos to iPod, iPod touch accessibility settings, Disabling Shake to Shuffle on iPod nano, Purchased songs fail to download from iTunes Store, Charging and powering off iPhone

10-16-09: Moving iTunes to a new computer, Transferring contacts from Blackberry to an iPhone, Disabling iPhone Backups, Using AV cables for audio only, Problems syncing photos to iPod touch, Memorex iFlip and iPhone compatibility

10-9-09: iPhone OS and external keyboards, Adjusting ratings in a remote iTunes library, Excluding tracks from Genius Mixes, Moving iTunes library out of My Documents, Playlist folders on iPod touch, Refreshing random Smart Playlists

9-25-09: iTunes 9 and Shopping Cart, Restoring iTunes to an external hard drive, Using an HTTP Proxy over 3G, Problems transferring movies from iTunes to IPhone, iPod touch shuffle mode, Using an iPhone without a SIM card

See the rest of the Archives...