Re: [Hampshire] Losing data on iPod

> For my birthday, Laura my girlfriend got me an iPod shuffle

OK - first up, I have no knowledge of the Shuffle. 'Er Indoors has a Video
iPod; I'm assuming that these are smiilar, and that might be a huge
mistake :-)

> Now, it almost works absolutely fine, except I mysteriously lost a
> load of songs from it yesterday. I put this down to it auto-mounting
> with the wrong character set.

Are the tracks stored in files on the Shuffle? The 5th generation units
use a database-type affair. This sorts out namespace collisions nicely
(you can have as many tracks called "Song 2" as you like - whether they're
by Blur or not), but means you need the right tools to talk to it...

> I'm using Ubuntu Edgy

How are you talking to the unit?

In Linux, I use gtkPod, which is just fabulous. But on Windows, you're
stuck with iTunes (AFAIK, anyway) - and iTunes does not play well with
others...

If you've added a number of items with something else (like gtkPod), the
next time you allow iTunes to "sync" (which is probably done automatically
when next you plug the iPod in), you will get exactly what it says on the
tin - a synchronised copy of what iTunes has as its "library". So anything
that was on the iPod but not in iTunes is now history. I've lost a lot of
data[1] that way.

gtkPod, by comparison, has a quick moan about not being told what you're
up to, then goes about sorting itself out.

Vic.


[1] Videos. iTunes won't see the stuff I encoded as valid video files. So
I put them onto the iPod with gtkPod, and it plays them *flawlessly*. And
the next time the iPod is plugged in to iTunes, they're all wiped.