Much rejoicing Chez 6000 as it appears that after my only partially successful repair of iTunes last week, I have managed to find another 1788 tracks that were “missing”. I’m still not 100% sure that I will be able to get them onto iTunes, but at least they’re safely somewhere on a hard drive. The next step might be a little messy, but it should be pretty straightforward.
The tracks disappeared when I plugged in my daughter’s prize from Kfm (not that I’m blaming her or them) – a shiny little iPod shuffle she got for dancing in the rain while watching the Two Oceans Marathon last month.
It brought up a beautifully clean iTunes window, to which I added some songs she liked (Coldplay, Freshlyground, Slipknot etc) and all seemed well. However, when I later plugged my Big Daddy iPod in, iTunes comprehensively failed to revert to my previous library, leaving me with about 30 tracks, some of which were by Shakira.
Issues.
I have since pieced together a rudimentary replacement library, but there were gaps. Massive gaps of several thousand tracks.
I had to root around on external hard drives and the like, but with today’s discovery, there’s “only” a discrepancy of about 900 items. I have yet to check whether they are important items, replaceable items or stuff I can (or will have to) manage without. This may be a difficult task, since sometimes, I’m just heading to the lab when I have a “must listen to” moment. It will be then that these discrepancies will become immediately obvious. Rage will surely ensue.
My advice to you if your 3 year old wins an iPod is not to plug it into your computer. At all. The best way is to find another computer and use iTunes on there. Or sell it on gumtree. It will save you sleepless nights, much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
I’m sure that there is a safe and surefire way of running two (or more) iPods from the same computer. More fool me for ever imagining that Apple would have made it as simple as just plugging the new device into the USB port.
By all means, let me know the best way of doing it in the comments section below, but don’t expect me to let that little silver square anywhere near my desktop ever again.
Capisce?
Check out MusicBee. While iTunes does allow you to disable auto-sync – thereby avoiding problems like the one you experienced – MusicBee makes that and all other functions easier. Plus, it has complete tag control, including display options for showing inconsistent/missing tags, so you can sort your library out properly.
It’s free, not nearly as bloated, and doesn’t want to update all the time.
Further to Jacques comment above, you need to set the sync options or each ipod device you use. We currently have 4 devices connectiong to iTunes on one desktop. I have a deveil of a time making sure my daughter (11) doesn;t just add stuff willy-nilly and have set up a separate library for each of us. Otherwise I end up will bloody Jessie J, Will.i.am and other people I’ve never heard on my ipod. Really makes you go “WTF?” on shuffle when The Immigrant Song is followed by some bloke who only has one name.