Evil Electronics

[indygodusk]

I just bought a new Macbook last week and got a free (with rebate) iPod nano with it.  I also bought a flash drive.  This was gerally happy, but caused a bunch of problems too.  The flash drive I bought didn't work, so I had to return it.  And since I've never had a Mac, there are a lot of things I don't know how to do on it.  Plus my new flash

Comments

[lydilia]

When I delete things off my external hard drive using my Mac, I have to drag the item to the trash, then go up under finder and hit empty trash. If I just trash it without emptying the trash, the file will show up again later. Maybe your drive is like that?

Sadly, I don't think you can transfer stuff from an iPod to your computer. When you put the song on the iPod, your computer turns it into the kind of file iPods read. But the iPod doesn't have the capacity to write it back into something your computer can read, because the designers sacrificed that sort of thing in order to let it hold more songs for less space. At least that's how it was explained to me.

I watch all my doramas using VLC. I've never had to download any codecs or anything, because VLC is a player that takes care of all of that business for you. I just open VLC, drag the name of the file onto the controller, and it plays. At least, anything named .avi plays, and I've never downloaded a show that wasn't in .avi format. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

oops, sorry for the long-windedness. hope any of this helps!

[elenayuan]

"Sadly, I don't think you can transfer stuff from an iPod to your computer. When you put the song on the iPod, your computer turns it into the kind of file iPods read."

really? Is it a nano thing? or I remembered this wrong
http://www.mp3.com/features/stories/1829.html&ref_id=1&ref_type_id=8

[lydilia]

Yeah, when you import the music with iTunes so you can listen to it with your iPod, it translates it into an iPod-only format. That page describes dragging it to the iPod when you use it as an external hard disk, which doesn't translate it, but it can't be played on the iPod unless you put it on a computer again and use iTunes to put it back on the iPod. I have a 20 gig photos iPod, and the photos that I sync with iTunes can be viewed on my iPod, but I also have hundreds of photos that are just in storage on it. I can't view them on the iPod; I have to put them on a computer first.

Most of this is stuff I heard from someone who knows someone who knows, but it explains everything I've observed. Nanos might be different, I don't know. If there is a way to get the music files, I wanna know! My computer died and I got a new one, and now my iPod has all of my old music that I want to put on my new one.

That page does outline a way Karen might get her music. Enable the iPod as an external if it isn't already, hook it up to the work computer and drag the music files to it bypassing iTunes, and then drag them out of it again at home and import them into iTunes.

[lydilia]

I have an iPod and iBook, though i use my iPod with windows too. When i first began using mac i got really confused, but i discovered a few quirks that really helped. For example pressing ctrl when i click something, then you get a options menu similar to window's right click... As for the whole trash problem, i know you can fix the way you're deleting stuff in the system preferences somewhere >.> I don't remember right now though. I would look it up, but I'm not using my iBook.
You can use your iPod as a pendrive, any ipod for that matter, really. Although you must access it as a pendrive, and don't use iTunes for filesharing, otherwise the iPod won't let you take it off. I'm not sure you can use it to transfer music between computers, but you can use programs for that... For example, (http : //www.engadget.com / 2004/11 /02/ how-to-get-music-off-your-ipod/). I really recommend this program!
Hope you update TSC soon, it's one of the best stories out there in this fandom!
Good-luck with your new mac :)

Paula

[indygodusk]

Thanks for the great advice. Those definitely fixed my problems!!!