Using an iPod with Windows Media Player

[coip]

With pretty much any other mp3 player you can plug it in, open up Windows Media Player, and it'll immediately recognize the device and allow you to transfer files to it quite easily. An iPod Touch recently came into my possession (I would never buy one, for the very reason that I'm here writing this thread: they're too restrictive and iTunes is terrible), so I plugged it in to put some music on it but Windows Media Player won't recognize it. I see that there is a paid plug-in you can buy (MGTEK) but it seems a bit pricey at $20 and it also seems like they don't support the software anymore. I'm surprised that some 'open source' do-gooders haven't written a solid, free plug-in. Is there a way to turn an iPod into a regular mp3 player so that Windows Media Player can sync with it? I don't want to use iTunes. Please don't tell me I have to use iTunes.

 

[yeoldgreat1]

I vaguely remember seeing a while ago that if you jailbreak it then you can access it as a mass storage device and put files on it that way. Maybe give that a go.

 

[coip]

I vaguely remember seeing a while ago that if you jailbreak it then you can access it as a mass storage device and put files on it that way. Maybe give that a go.

I will look into that because I tried the MGTEK plug-in and wasted like 4 hours trying to get it work, to no avail.

 

[Guzzler3]

Yea... It's an issue. You won't be able to put music on an iPod via WMP, without some plugin or rooting the player and putting a different firmware on.

I hated my iPod just because of this issue. I caved in and installed iTunes, which then ran into issues of those pieces of software fighting with updating the ID3 tags of my music. Had to dig through the settings on each to turn off auto update the ID3 info.

The happiest day of my life was when the iPod died, then shortly after my iPhone died. Which forced me to look elsewhere for new devices.

 

[coip]

Yea... It's an issue. You won't be able to put music on an iPod via WMP, without some plugin or rooting the player and putting a different firmware on.

I hated my iPod just because of this issue. I caved in and installed iTunes, which then ran into issues of those pieces of software fighting with updating the ID3 tags of my music. Had to dig through the settings on each to turn off auto update the ID3 info.

The happiest day of my life was when the iPod died, then shortly after my iPhone died. Which forced me to look elsewhere for new devices.

I had been avoiding the iPod / iTunes thing for years when I first saw my friend taking his music, burning it onto a CD and then re-ripping it back into iTunes and I said, "What the hell are you doing?" He explained that that was the only way to remove all the restrictive bull**** that Apple imposed on his music files. What a waste of time.

And now here I am 7 years later and I encountered my first iPod (I married into it), which unfortunately is seemingly the only device that my car recognizes, so I thought I would give it a shot and try to put my music on it to play in the car. Wow, all my fears were confirmed. There is no way outside of iTunes to do any file management or use another music manager. Plugins won't recognize the device either. So I downloaded iTunes and I've got to say, WTF? What a terribly designed user interface. It is a huge chore to do anything like simple file management. I complained to my wife and she said, "No, it's easy, you just plug it in and it syncs everything automatically!". And, alas, I understood why iPods got popular: 90% of users out there no nothing about how to use computers and they really liked the simplicity of the plug-and-auto-sync (which other devices can do too, by the way) feature. I think I'm just give up.

 

[Guzzler3]

You have to remember that iTunes started life as just a spreadsheet with a bunch of macros to extract the metadata (i.e. ID3 tags) and to launch a player. Once I learned that, I understood why it is the way it is. It's been "munged" over time to become what it is today.

But yea, if you just accept that you have to use iTunes with iPods/iPhones, then it works. What I ended up doing was having one old laptop that I didn't care about, and it just ran iTunes for syncing/installing/updating things. It sucked because I had to keep copies of my music in two places. But at least my main system ran smoothly because it DIDN'T have iTunes and all it's weird other programs running on it.

 

[hs k]

Guzzler3:: Same here too. ******* thing wouldn't recognize my music collection. Well, atleast most of the 300gigs on my laptop. I removed it before it ****ed my folder structure and I now use Foobar2000 to play music and Mediamonkey to sync music/videos to my phone.

PS. Does anyone know how to setup a working DLNA over foobar? It just doesn't work man for me. Atleast Mediamonkey does.

 

[BelindaRaman]

I've just changed a new computer and want to transfer my iPod music, because the iTunes data from my old computer no longer exist due to virus damage. So, I search for an solution to transfer music from ipod to computer. Just wonder is there any way to achieve this without iTunes? It’s not a convenient way to backup music.

 

[sibeans]

I've just changed a new computer and want to transfer my iPod music, because the iTunes data from my old computer no longer exist due to virus damage. So, I search for an solution to transfer music from ipod to computer. Just wonder is there any way to achieve this without iTunes? It?s not a convenient way to backup music.

there's a way to access the 'hidden folders' of music on the iPod where you can manually transfer the files to the iTunes on the new computer but not all the track information will be retained (really, really f***ing annoying) where you would have to manually correct every single song...not sure why this happens since all the metadata on the iPod are correct, and prior to uploading the songs to the iPod I corrected the metadata using Window Media Player...iTunes for Windows is really, really subpar but unfortunately comes with the territory of using an iPod classic

 

[BelindaRaman]

Hi, sibeans. thanks for your quick reply. Now, i'm trying suggestions online...