My fifth generation nano will no longer sync my address book from my Mac. It gives me an error message that "You have no contacts" and asks me if I want to create some. My address book is full of contacts. Sync works for everything else.

It sounds like all of your contacts on your Mac running Lion are actually stored up in iCloud.

Several users running Mac OS X Lion and now ML (and iCloud) have no longer been able to "sync" contacts over to their older iPods models.

A work around is to export all of your contacts out of Address Book as vCards and them copy these vCards into your iPod's Contacts folder. You'll need to have the Enable Disk Use option ticked from under the iPod's Summary tab in order to browse out to the iPod's Contacts folder via the Finder.

Using your iPod as a storage drive

That's the only "solution" I have been able to use to get contacts to sync/appear on my 5G iPod Video.

B-rock

Do you think that turning on "Enable Disk Use" on my iPod and trying this has any possibility for creating more problems I won't know how to fix?

Nope.

Do you have any suggestions how I could learm more about how to use and understand iCloud?

The best I can do is point to some articles online for the time being that at least provide a good overview and explanation of what iCloud is and how it works.

http://www.macinaminute.com/what-is-icloud-and-do-i-need-it

B-rock

Your welcome. 🙂

Basically, the only way to be able to sync contact to your older Nano is to either turn iCloud off in System Preferences or use a device that supports iCloud, which is an iOS device running iOS 5 or later.

If you turn off iCloud via System Preferences, make sure that all your contacts all stored locally on your Mac first.

B-rock