OK, so I have an ipod question. It's time for me to format my ipod and reinstall all my music and podcasts and all the rest, cause my ipod is a mess. I'll probably also set it to automatically sync, instead of manually, like i have been doing in the past.
My question is as follows -
Since I have USB 1.0 on my laptop, and all my music is on a USB Hard drive - would it be faster to set up my USB hard drive on Lauren's computer (via her USB 2.0 ports) and then send the music over the network to my computer? (Does that even work?)
Alternatively, I suppose I could add a Windows username for myself to her computer, and then sync my ipod with her computer.
FYI - if you have USB 1.0 with your ipod - you will be amazed at the blindingly fast difference in speed.
The problem you might find is that... if you associate the ipod with another computer. It wouldn't (i believe) do an auto sync with yours after that, it would be linked to the other.
Anybody else.. go any ideas...
If it were me... in my mac-ness I would start the old one in target disk mode connect with firewire and use the computer with 2.0 to run the old system only with the faster bus. But alas I don't think you got anything like that for windows?
it depends on how much music you're talking about.
let's say you have 20 GB of music.
to sync your ipod with USB 1.1, it will take almost 4 hours at that speed (12 Mb/s)
USB 2.0 can effectively get about 320 Mb/s, so it most likely will take less than 10 minutes to transfer 20 GB. Realistically speaking, it will probably take closer to 15 minutes.
So, figure about 40 minutes overall, give or take, to use the USB 2.0 ports on your wife's PC. MUCH better.
But, monster's correct in that you may have syncing issues with using a different PC. Although I haven't tried it, I think they improved their multiple PC syncing stuff in iTunes 7, so I'd at least give it a shot.
theoretically, it SHOULD take 4 hours, but realistically, it doesn't work like that in my experience. it seems to take its sweet time doing things like "analyzing song volume" and "checking for gapless playback" and "looking for album art".
i may set it up around 7 tomorrow night, and see if everything is done by the time i go to work on wednesday
ideally, i'd add the USB HD to my wife's USB 2.0 port, set it up as a mapped drive on my PC, drag and drop the entire mapped drive onto iTunes "library" - but it would probably take like 10 hours to add it to my library, so that would kill it.
FWIW, you can't drag and drop sirectly onto your ipod from a USB drive, unless you drop it into your library first. DRM at it's finest, people.
oh, right. i was really describing how it would work if you were to just attach the hard drive to her computer and use that to sync.
syncing itunes with a removable hard drive isn't really the best way to do it, unfortunately. itunes is very fragile when it comes to tracking the physical files.
and letting itunes analyze all the songs for gapless playback and song volume is going to take FOREVER on a usb drive. that's just torture. unless you've already done it somewhere. if it's completed on your laptop, just sync it with usb 1.1 on there and let it go overnight like you said.