Sunday, March 18, 2007

Out of Sync

I got a new video iPod yesterday. Tripling the types of media I can keep on there is pretty cool, but I'm not sure I quite like the management options for it all. Or perhaps I just haven't yet figured out how to make it do what I want it to do.

I added all my photos to the iPod but then found out that I had a new, 4GB+ folder of iPod cached images or something like that on my hard drive. That's not the kind of space I want it taking up. Heck, I've got more free space on my iPod right now that my computer; it should put all it's cached files there or something. Anyway, I deleted that and also unchecked the "sync photos" option for the iPod. It seems to be okay with leaving the existing photos on the iPod in spite of that, which is what I want. I'll just have to go through the whole conversion/caching process again the next time I want to sync up my photos. So that's kind of annoying, but I not too bad. (And now that I think of it, I should have just copied that cache folder to the iPod disk space, and copied it back for the next sync, rather than just deleting it. Oh well.)

Syncing movies seems more problematic. I keep most of my music on my computer, and most of my movies on my external hard drive. I want music to sync automatically, because there's so much of it that I don't want to keep track of what's new and needs adding. But I want to sync the movies manually, so I can just add new ones without it deleting old ones (because I've removed them from my iTunes library and put them back on my external HD). But iTunes makes both music and movies follow the same manual/automatic setting and I can't separate them. I've played around with the different syncing options (like only sync selected movies) but that doesn't seem to do the trick.

Has anyone figured out a good way to set this up? The only workaround I can think of is keeping a separate folder on one of my drives just for iPod movies, then copying them in to iTunes each time before I sync up, then removing them again. Kind of a pain. Otherwise it's a matter of having more stuff on my computer's HD than I want, or less stuff on my iPod.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The solution to your movie problem is quite simple.

The iTunes only looks to see if the file name is there...not if the movie is there. So you synch your ipod up, and then use wordpad to save a text file. It can be an empty file with nothing in it. Then you rename the file and extension to the name of a movie that is synched to your iPod and switch them out. The next time itunes synchs your iPod, it will see that "Rambo.m4v" for instance, is in the directory as it should be and continue synching. iTunes has no idea that a 1.5 gig file was replaced with a 1kb text file. Then you can burn your iPod movies off to a DVD and keep the place holder text files on your HD.

Always remember to move the movie to another location so you can burn it off to a DVD for safe keeping before sliding the dummy file in place. Otherwise you will write over your movie.