iPod SHuffle Help

[scrotnig]

Can anyone help me this? It's driving me nuts.

A friend of mine has bought an iPod Shuffle. Now, I despise these things as they are so tricky to use. But anyway.

She has given me four CDs of MP3 songs she wants on the iPod. I have installed iTunes 8 which I believe you have to do. But how do I then transfer the songs from the CDs onto the iPod?

I did a bit of messing about with playlists and then autofill, but it will only store one CD at a time. If you change CDs the songs from the first CD get an exclamation mark next to them and it says they cannot be found.

I just want to put songs from 4 CDs onto one iPod, surely this isn't difficult/impossible?

Any advice welcome as I'm not PC illierate by a long way but this nonsense has me completely flummoxed now.

[Raistlin]

You have to 'rip' the CDs to the computer, then transfer them to the iPod.

[scrotnig]

Do you do that in iTunes? As I'm trying to do it direct from the CD.

[Raistlin]

Yep.

Install iTunes, leave the iPod unplugged for now.

Load iTunes, insert your CD, it will probably ask if you want to rip it - answer yes.

Repeat the process for all CDs.

Plug in the iPod and it should sync the tunes to the iPod (probably).

In practice it can be more complicated than that, you can set certain discs/tracks not to sync, change the way things are ripped, etc. In reality this will (hopefully) accomplish what you want in the short term, but if you're going to continue to do this for your friend then it would be worth at least one of you learing how to use iTunes properly

[scrotnig]

Thanks Rob.

It didn't ask me to rip anything, but the tracks eventually appeared under "music" in black boxes.

But when I changed to another CD, while the titles from the first remained, the tracks themselves weren't there.

[Raistlin]

Odd.....

Not sure what's happening there, sorry.

When you insert a CD it should show on the list on the left of the screen, the same one where you get 'music', 'podcasts', etc.

If you click on that it should take you to the track listing for the CD, down in the bottom right there should be a button that says 'rip' I think - I'm at the wrong machine at the moment so I'm afraid I can't be more precise than that sorry

[scrotnig]

Aha...I've got an "import CD" button...going to try that and report back. Thanks.

[Raistlin]

That's the chap

It should copy the contents of the CD to your local disk, then you can drag them across (or they may sync naturally) to the iPod

[scrotnig]

Where do I find the previous CDs' contents once they are all imported?

[Raistlin]

Should show up in the 'Music' bit of the list on the right.

[scrotnig]

Got it...but now I've changed to the second CD, all the songs from the first are marked with an exclmation mark. If you try to "show info" it says the original file cannot be found. Is that normal?

[Raistlin]

No.

I'm downloading it now, I'll install it on this machine - there's a setting somewhere that's been missed, I'll find it and let you know what it is

[scrotnig]

Originally Posted by Rob M

No.

I'm downloading it now, I'll install it on this machine - there's a setting somewhere that's been missed, I'll find it and let you know what it is

Thanks Rob.

The subsequent CDs don't come up with the "Import" option either. Something's amiss somewhere.

[Raistlin]

Edit > Preferences

Advanced tab.

Choose a location for the files (your library).

Tick the box that says "Copy files to iTunes....." etc.

Try that.

[Uncle Peter]

If the tracks on the CDs are already MP3s they don't need to be ripped.

As long as the shuffle is not configured to synchronise with a specific machine you can drag the tracks directly into the ipod/shuffle from Windows explorer or Apple Finder:

Just select the tracks you want and drag them across to the "Devices" section in the left hand navigation menu in iTunes and you will see a plus sign appear next to the cursor. Let the mouse button go and the tracks will copy across.