07-08-2008, 11:06 PM

Hi all,

Today, I just received my ipod touch via the student deal from the apple site. Unfortunately, my mbp has not yet arrived, but I'm itching to try out my ipod touch.

If I use it on my xp machine and put music on it etc, when I plug it into my mbp, will I have to format it or anything?


thanks

07-09-2008, 02:36 AM

Unfortunately, to prevent music piracy and other difficulties, when using a different computer, it will want to reformat your iPod.

With that said, if you format it on you XP machine and load a few songs on it, then when you get your Mac you will have to format again and will lose your previously uploaded songs.

My advice would be to wait on your Mac, iTunes works 20x better on OS X than on Windows. I used a Nano for a couple years on a Windows machine and I wasn't impressed. When I got my Touch, I started using my Mac and needless to say, I was happier with it. Maybe they improved iTunes or the iPod, something was better...

07-09-2008, 08:20 AM

alright, will do!

07-09-2008, 08:55 AM

Actually, you can use it on your Windows machine just fine - as Intelligent mentioned, when you connect it to your Mac, it will suggest that you format it for Mac, but it's not required.

07-09-2008, 04:28 PM

Originally Posted by INTELligent

Maybe they improved iTunes or the iPod, something was better...

One thing I have noticed since I reformatted to Mac was that song and movie uploads were a lot faster than they were on my previous laptop (Toshiba Satellite).

07-09-2008, 04:49 PM

could that be because you switched to firewire or something?

07-09-2008, 04:58 PM

Nope, USB

Not sure. It used to take my PC a couple minutes to get all the songs uploaded to my iPod, but then on the Mac, the "Syncing iPod" pops up for a couple seconds then tells me it's complete. And that was with the newest album I bought (B.B. King Gold, which was a 2-Disc set with 34 songs).

07-09-2008, 10:24 PM

Originally Posted by cuhnool

Nope, USB

Not sure. It used to take my PC a couple minutes to get all the songs uploaded to my iPod, but then on the Mac, the "Syncing iPod" pops up for a couple seconds then tells me it's complete. And that was with the newest album I bought (B.B. King Gold, which was a 2-Disc set with 34 songs).

Perhaps it was the difference between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 speeds? Who knows...

07-09-2008, 10:35 PM

I recently reformatted my 4th generation iPod to my mac (I had used it on my PC for the past three years) and it was fine. Actually i did not have to reformat it just to sync the library but i did anyways so that it would be able to update the software on my iPod. All it does is wipe the iPod clean and then re-sync the library on your computer (which consisted of the exact same stuff seeing as i imported my iTunes from my PC) to the iPod and your in business.

07-09-2008, 11:19 PM

Originally Posted by cwa107

Perhaps it was the difference between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 speeds? Who knows...

Dunno. My laptop claims it has USB 2.0

Maybe it was the OS it was running. It became very sluggish after only half a year's worth of use. Pretty pathetic, actually.

07-09-2008, 11:50 PM

well I'd hope that itunes would work better with apple.

I just checked the tracking on my mbp and it is actually arriving this Friday, so I can definitely wait it out.

01-21-2009, 07:00 PM

I have an iPod Nana, and a very old 40 gig iPod. I used to use my Nano with my windows PC and my 40 gig iPod with my OS X machine. However, my library of music was duplicated on my XP machien and my OS X machine. One day my XP machine crashed and I had to reinstall. Becuase of this, I no longer had any music on my XP machine. I could have simply formated the Nano and synced with my OS X machien but I was lazy and just listened to whatever music was on my Nano. Until today. After digging around on the internet I found you can tell your windows machine to use an OS X library. You need to network your machines together, there are lots of site that will explain how to do this, and you need to enable sharing on your OS X account that has your iTunes library. Once hooked up all you need to do is hold shift while your iTunes is loading on your XP machine. This will give you the option to associate a new library with your XP iTunes install. You need to find a file called iTunes Library.itl. The only problem is iTunes Library.itl is called iTunes Library on the Mac, no .itl. However, simply copying the file and adding .itl to the end is all that you need to do. Then point your XP machine at the iTunes Library.ilt file on your mac, across the network, and you XP machine will now have access to yoru library. The only drawback is you have to recopy the iTunes Library file to iTunes Library.itl everytime you add new files. I tried symlinking to iTunes Library but the windows install of iTunes overwrites the symlink during loading.

Hope this is usefule info.