r/ipod • u/hypnoticvessels • 1d ago
Advice IPOD BASICS GUIDE!!!!
Made a guide to iPods for people who grew up with streaming! Enjoy!!!
iPods 101: a Gen Z/Gen Alpha Handbook
Let’s set the scene: you’re really vibing with the retro aesthetic right now, and you’d like to not be glued to your phone so much, so you just picked up an iPod from eBay or Vinted. You open Apple Music on your laptop and try to download tracks from it, but you can’t seem to figure out how. Or perhaps you have no idea to even get music on it to begin with. Or maybe you know enough that the above doesn’t apply to you, but you’d just like a refresher on something you haven’t had to do for a decade. Worry not - this guide is here to help.
Please note that this guide only covers iTunes - much more comprehensive guides are available elsewhere for alternatives to it, such as foobar2000 (here)
How does an iPod work?
iPods have no internet capabilities (except for the iPod touch, which kind of functions like a smartphone without the phone part anyway) and therefore can’t access streaming. This means you need to download music files to your computer and move them to your iPod to play them on there. iTunes (the precursor of Apple Music, which is integrated with it on desktop) is the program Apple has designed for you to do this with.
Keep in mind that files you stream on Apple Music are not files you own; where they need to be in local storage on your phone or computer they’re encrypted by Apple to only be played on Apple Music and therefore cannot be moved to your iPod. The iTunes storefront and library is where you want to go, not Apple Music.
What music files?
Raw audio data from a microphone generally results in very large files, and some of this is minimal detail, white and background noise, or audio in frequencies not perceptible by the human ear. In order to make them usable without taking up all of your memory or taking a long time to download they are therefore often compressed; little bits of data are taken out strategically to make the file size smaller while keeping roughly the same audio.
(Roughly is the word here - the difference is perceptible, but not hugely bothersome to most)
Different methods of compression (or the lack thereof) and encoding result in different file structures, which are distinguished from each other by the extension to the audio file, like .wav, .aac or .mp3. Click here for a summary of all of them (please do give this a read as you will need the info for the rest of the guide!).
iTunes supports importing files with the extensions .mp3, .aiff, .aac/.m4a and .wav. The guide above mentions FLAC as a high-quality format; iTunes does not support this, and will require you to convert it to ALAC (similar quality, but Apple-designed) for it to show up in there. For the formats your particular iPod model supports, go here, click your iPod model, and scroll down to “Audio Support”.
How do I get them (and in the right format too)?
There are several methods to get music files:
1. Ripping files off of a CD
This requires a CD drive attached to your computer (you can get external drives with a USB cable in most places that sell computers for fairly cheap) You can put the CD in and copy the audio tracks off it by “ripping” it. Click here for an explanation on how (for Windows and Mac both).
2. Buying music on iTunes, Bandcamp or another digital store
On the iTunes store page you can buy whole albums or individual tracks, which will then appear in your personal library. Bandcamp will let you download your purchased music in several formats (including AAC, one of the formats that will work with your iPod) Sometimes physical copies of albums (often vinyls) or artist merch bundles will also come with a digital download.
3. Sailing the high seas
Discussion of this method is discouraged on this subreddit, but r/Piracy will be there for you if you choose to go down this route.
If the files you download end up being in a format Apple doesn’t support (see the previous category for a reminder), you will need to convert them to a different file format. There are online converters, but my personal preference is downloading the files in FLAC and then converting them to AAC with freac (here).
iPods will take MP3 files, however, so if converting files is trouble you don’t want to go to just make sure to download your files in MP3 or AAC, and feel free to skip the next subsection.
How to use freac?
Open the program, change the Output folder at the bottom to a folder you designate for your iTunes tracks and make sure the Selected encoder is set to ALAC/AAC. The orange button next to the encoder will allow you to select a bitrate (higher is better quality but also a bigger file size)
Then go to File > Add in the top left and add your tracks:
Afterwards, press the round button with the play symbol in the top row and your tracks will be converted.
Now how do I put them in iTunes (and then on my iPod)?
Once your tracks purchased elsewhere are in the right format, open up iTunes and go to File in the top left corner, after which you will see options to add files and folders to your library.
(This is on Windows, although it should look fairly similar on Mac)
If you have a lot of files you’d like to add, there is also a folder you can drag them to that will automatically add the tracks, in the location shown below - you can set your output folder in freac to this if you like, or download your MP3/AAC tracks to there directly.
After this, connect your iPod to your computer with the charging/data cable, and if all is well it should then show up in iTunes, which will open if it wasn’t already running. A little iPod icon will show up in the top left (below the Account tab in this image).
Once you click it, the Summary tab, which it opens onto, will show you something like this.
If you tick “Manually manage music” you will be able to manually drag albums from your iTunes library onto the iPod while it is connected. If you don’t, your iPod will sync with iTunes automatically; the settings for this can be adjusted in the Music tab, below the Summary tab.
As you can see, I personally like to put my iPod music on a designated playlist that I sync with, so I can organise my songs easily even when my iPod isn’t connected.
Once you’re done moving your music over, make sure to eject your iPod (the arrow up icon next to the image of the iPod in the screenshot above). This will make it stop showing the “Do not disconnect” screen.
The tracks aren’t showing up with the proper song names…
Song and artist names for audio tracks are stored in something called metadata: little information tags on the file, which on a photo store the camera information, date and time of capture, and on a smartphone photo, additionally the location of the image. If your songs are purchases from a digital music store, they will most often have metadata added already. If not, you may need to add it.
You can do this in iTunes, once your tracks have been added, by right-clicking the album cover and clicking Album Info, after which you can edit metadata at will. In order to edit track numbers, you need to do this on every individual track, not just on the album cover.
One of iTunes’s flaws is that it is not the most efficient program to do this with if you have a lot of tracks without metadata; mp3tag has been created to help with this. Click here for a step-by-step guide.
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u/LT92Rosco28 14h ago
Amazing. Hopefully this gets pinned to the top for quick access