CoffeeBear.net

iPod and iTunes

Posted by Mark | Filed under Computers

Recently, I’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing some prob­lems get­ting iTunes & Win­dows to read/write from/to my iPod. Some­times, both Win­dows & iTunes could see it but even then I could only trans­fer maybe 1 or 2 files before I’d start hav­ing prob­lems. And occas­sion­ally, Win­dows should BSOD on me. I started brows­ing the Apple forums and found out I wasn’t the only one hav­ing this prob­lem. But I’ve got an older iPod and my PC has onboard Firewire ports that I use to con­nect my iPod to. Find­ing some­body else report­ing the exact same prob­lems I was hav­ing was sim­ple, but most times the solu­tion men­tioned was to switch from using USB con­nec­tions to Firewire. After some more hunt­ing around in the forums; I noticed that most peo­ple rec­om­mended using an Adaptec Fire­Con­nect 4300 to hook up your iPod to your com­puter. And yes­ter­day while shop­ping for my brother’s birth­day present at Best­Buy; I noticed they had the card in the store. I thought about it but held off; as I hadn’t really tried out GTK­Pod under my Linux install yet. It started to work but my com­puter ended up freez­ing solid. I couldn’t SSH into it or get it to switch to another ses­sion to close out and had to power my com­puter off/on.¹

So when that didn’t work; I decided I’d go back to Best Buy and get the card. I am ever glad that I did. Hook­ing up the iPod to the Fire­Con­nect 4300 works like a charm. Nei­ther Win­dows or iTunes had any trou­ble reading/writing from/to the iPod and it feels like the music files get trans­fered over faster too. So if you’re hav­ing read/write prob­lems with your iPod and you’re not using an Adaptec Fire­Con­nect 4300; buy one now!

¹ I don’t blame GTK­Pod for this, as I’ve heard the 2.6.8 ker­nel has issues with Firewire dri­ves and I am cur­rently run­ning a 2.6.8 kernel.

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