12-25-2006, 02:21 PM

Hi everyone,

I've been a Mac owner for about six months now and just got an ipod as a Christmas gift. The reason I wanted an ipod was because my music collection is starting to catch up with the size of my hard drive. I got the 80 GB ipod because I figured I could upload everything to the ipod and then delete quite a bit from the hard drive.

Now:

I've already synched and subsequently accidentally deleted all of my music two or three times now. What I gather from this forum is that the best thing to do is switch the synching to manual.

Am I on the right track?

I'd really like to clear some music off of my hard drive without fear that it'll disappear completely next time I plug my ipod in.

Was my initial hope that I could use the device as a sort of external music hard drive naive? :bomb:

12-26-2006, 06:25 AM

most mp3 players will act as an external hard drive for various types of files (some, like my sandisk player act exactly like that with no additional software required).

i can't see why your ipod wouldn't just leave the songs on the ipod and not on the hard drive on your mac. though i have no direct ownership experience with the things.

12-26-2006, 02:47 PM

For what you want to do, manual is really the only way to go here. You can upload your music to the iPod and then dump it off your hard drive. BUT, if your iPod goes south, needs to be reformatted or has to be serviced by Apple you can kiss all of your music goodbye. Before putting all of your trust in the iPod, invest in some sort of backup system, be it an external HDD or a bunch of DVDs, back up that music collection first. If you don't, you'll be sorry in the end.

12-26-2006, 04:08 PM

yeah.. if you have a bunch of dvds just click back up to disc and it will just keep asking for discs.. make sure you label them though because when going back to put the songs back on the computer it has to be done in order.

12-27-2006, 01:35 AM

How do you set your ipod to manual?

12-27-2006, 02:13 AM

Click on your iPod in iTunes, under the summary tab check the box "Manually manage Music and Videos". Make sure you click apply at the bottom right afterwards.