How do I get my music that's in the cloud onto my 3rd gen iPod?

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Level 1

16 points

How do I get my music that's in the cloud onto my 3rd gen iPod?

When I up dated/graded my iTunes it put all my music in the cloud which I thought was a great idea since my laptops hard drive was full and I desperately needed the space. That was until I brought home my old 3rd gen 20GB iPod that used to have my entire music library on it. I plugged it into my laptop and tried to sync it to get some of my newly purchased music on it and it didn't want to sync for some reason and when I finally did get it to sync it went from about 2500 some songs to 700??? So after messing around with it for quite a while and trying many more times to sync it, I came to realize it would only sync the songs that are downloaded on my laptop, if they are in the cloud they will not sync. So my question is how do I get all my music loaded back onto my iPod without having to physically download it all back onto my laptop???

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.4), null

Posted on Jan 12, 2016 7:33 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Kiwi3856

Level 1

19 points

Jan 12, 2016 7:41 PM in response to gersh10

Have you seen this article?

Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device

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Answer 2

Jan 14, 2016 4:48 PM in response to gersh10

For iPods (that are not iPod touch), the song files need to stored locally, on the computer doing the syncing. There is no way to sync song files directly from your iCloud music library. If your MacBook's drive is too full to store your complete iTunes library, you should get an external drive. I think that's a good idea in any case, because it is prudent to have a copy of all of your songs stored locally, even if you have an iCloud music library. What if you decide to stop your subscription at some point, or an error causes your iCloud music library to be lost...

Because you may not want your MacBook attached to an external drive, every time you use iTunes, there is a way to put a "backup" of your iTunes folder on the external drive. You use your backup iTunes folder (with a local copy of all of your songs files) when you want to sync your iPod, and use your internal drive iTunes folder at other times. You can post back, for more info, if you want to do this.

And I hope you have your iCloud music library from iTunes Match, and not from (only) Apple Music.

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