I spent the last week aranging many songs from my library into playlists on my ipod. I wanted the same playlists on my computer through itunes. Itunes won't let me drag them over. I have all the songs on my computer so I don't want to copy the files from the ipod. I just want to have the songs arranged in the same playlists in itunes. Is there an easy way to do this?
No. The playlists are on my ipod, but not in itunes unless the ipod is connected. How do I transfer the playlists so they are available in itunes without having the ipod connected?
Read Jeff's post again. You want to get playlists off your iPod and into iTunes, yes? Pod Player (apparently, as I have never used it myself) can move those playlists onto your computer into iTunes. Patrick
Thank you. I didn't see the link. And yes. I wish I knew then to do everything in itunes first.... Anyway, I've seen these programs. It looks like they copy my files from my ipod and paste them into itunes. This would result in 1000's of copies. Can they just allow me to import the playlist without copying the song?
"If you have your iPod set to auto sync to iTunes, these playlists should be transferred to iTunes next time you connect it."
Erm, no... when you sync your iPod to iTunes evrything on your iPod, including playlists, will be erased and replaced by what is currently on iTunes!! Best not to ever sync iTunes & iPod in my opinion, especially if you're in the habit of removing things from iTunes in order to preserve memory, as I often do.. Manual management is by far the safer option.
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I posted a similar question a few days ago, although i also wanted to transfer the music in the playlists. I was led to various other applications that will do this: Senuti, iLinkPod, iGadget & iRip, which are all available as free downloads. I've been trying to establish which is best and so far noone has been able to advise me. So I have downloaded Senuti, iLinkPod & iRip to check them out and so far Senuti seems to be the best as it has an iTunes-like interface and allows the transfer of music already arranged in the form of a playlist. Only drawback is that you have to do it one playlist at a time (as far as I can see so far) which is slow, but at least it can be done. If you dont want to duplicate the music in the playlist because it's already in your music library, you can always delete it from iTunes afterwards by selecting the iTunes Music Library on the left of the iTunes window, going to View Menu, select Show Duplicates - then you can select and delete as necessary whilst the playlists you have transferred should remain. It's laborious i know, but i have yet to discover a better way! Hope this helps.. Francis
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Francis, On the Go playlists you create in the iPod will be synced BACK into iTunes when you update it. Although if you have removed the tunes from your iTunes library, they will also be removed from the On The Go playlist. So that is where your problem lies. Your method, which is not uncommon, is also commonly dangerous and MANY posts get here from people who have lost/broken/had stolen/etc their iPod and now have lost all their music since they kept erasing it from the iTunes library. A much better solution is to keep everything in iTunes which may mean either upgrading the internal hard drive of your computer or adding an external drive for your library. Hard drives are very affordable and huge now, so really there is no excuse and I don't feel all that bad for people who are penny-wise but pound foolish and end up losing their entire library because they couldn't spend, for example, $60 for a 300GB internal drive or the same price for a 200GB external drive. Especially those people who are really upset because they lost the 100+ iTunes music store purchases ($$$) that were on the iPod only. Patrick
"When you create a list of songs on your iPod, the songs appear in an On-The-Go playlist. iTunes saves playlists to your computer next time you autosync."
You are confusing the issue by making statments not related to the post.
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If you have your iPod set to auto sync to iTunes, these playlists should be transferred to iTunes next time you connect it."
Erm, no... when you sync your iPod to iTunes evrything on your iPod, including playlists, will be erased and replaced by what is currently on iTunes!! Please reread what you responded to. The iPod is in auto sync, not manual sync.
Best not to ever sync iTunes & iPod in my opinion, especially if you're in the habit of removing things from iTunes in order to preserve memory, You need to remove the word "especially" and make it,
Do not auto sync if you want to remove some/all from iTunes to save hard drive space.
And please note that HD Space is not memory.
my problem is i created these playlists by dragging the songs from my itunes library directly into playlist folders on my ipod (ie under devises on the left). i should have placed the songs into itunes playlists (ie under playlists). if anyone else is creating playlists, certainly create them in itunes first then copy them to your ipod because it doesn't appear you can do the reverse easily. the playlists i created have 1000's of songs so copying them into itunes and then deleting the duplicate songs would be just as much trouble as recreating the playlists in itunes.
i do manually manage my ipod. the size of my library is larger than my ipod so i can't auto sync.
anyway, does anyone know of a program or a way to copy playlists (and not the songs) from an ipod to itunes?
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i do manually manage my ipod. the size of my library is larger than my ipod so i can't auto sync."
Except that you can auto sync if you want. Just sync selected playlists instead of all. If you manage your playlists properly can you can create Smart Playlists that limit the amount of songs in a playlist so they will fit on your iPod. I don't have an answer to your question. Of the applications I know of that will bring stuff back into the iPod like playlists, these generally bring EVERYTHING back into iTunes including all the songs. I am not sure if any of them will allow you to only bring back playlists. But if you want to check some of them out... http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=776996&tstart=0 Patrick
"When you create a list of songs on your iPod, the songs appear in an On-The-Go playlist. iTunes saves playlists to your computer next time you autosync."
Hi Jeff,
I'm always happy to learn something new! The thing is I rarely, if ever, use On-The-Go Playlists, and it's some years since I've auto-synced my iPod with iTunes, so I didn't know that. I was assuming the person asking the original question had transferred playlists directly from iTunes, as I do (an assumption which has turned out to be not far from the truth as it happens). And of course, as PT points out, if the tunes in these playlists no longer exist in iTunes they will not be restored by auto-sync and, furthermore, they will be deletd from the iPod. There lies the problem, particularly when many of those playlist have been painstakenly put together in the first place.
Francis
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