Tutorial: How to use your I-Pod with Winamp

[floppybootstomp]

I’m going round to my friends for Christmas dinner and she tells that she recently bought a new computer and somehow managed to wipe her i-Pod clean of all music. As she’s very busy making preparations for tomorrow it means she doesn’t have time to load the I-Pod up before tomorrow, Christmas Day.

Which basically means we won’t have any music on Christmas Day. So I promised to load up my Christmas collection onto my I-Pod and take it to her place tomorrow.

Some time ago I threatened to write a tutorial on how to manage your I-Pod (or any other portable music device for that matter) within Winamp. As I’m transferring songs here I thought it would be a good time to do just that.

So here goes, Winamp with a Denon skin within Vista on my media machine:

First thing you do is connect your I-Pod to the computer then go to the menu, top left of Winamp, and open media library:

You’ll notice my I-Pod listed on the left hand side. It is worth mentioning that the I-Pod has to be configured to be seen by the computer as a hard disk but as this is, I believe, a default setting it shouldn’t present a problem. Here the I-Pod is Drive F:

If your I-Pod isn’t seen by your computer it may mean temporarily installing I-Tunes to carry out that function, it’s just a case of ticking a box in the I-Pod menu within I-Tunes. After that you may uninstall I-Tunes/Quicktime.

The next step is to open the tunes you wish to transfer from computer to I-Pod within Winamp:

I like to create folders to place albums or selections in and to do that, on the media library’s menu, left hand side, switch from ‘Portables’ to (in this instance) ‘Tony Sullivan’s I-Pod’ by clicking on it then right click on that title and select ‘Make New Playlist’.

Type in your folder title, click ok then scroll down to the bottom of the list of folders on your I-Pod to see the one you’ve just created at the bottom. Once you’ve transferred your tunes from computer to I-Pod the folder will find it’s place alphabetically listed when you next open Winamp’s media library.

Next, select and highlight all the songs you wish to place in your new folder within Winamp:

Now in the media library’s list of I-Pod folders scroll to the top and click on Portables. This will show the section where your transferred songs will show.

Within Winamp right click on the list of tunes you have there and select the ‘Send To’ option. This will bring up a list of places where you can transfer the tunes to, one of which will be your I-Pod. Click on that and watch the tunes transfer and be converted from whatever file format you have them in to m4a files to suit the I-Pod:

Within the media library highlight all the transferred songs then right click on that list. One of the options in the opened menu will be ‘Send to Playlist’ so select that. This shows a list of all the folders on your I-Pod. Within that list scroll to the relevant folder then click on it and you’ll find that your new folder now has all your selected tunes in it.

To do this scroll down the folder list again until you reach your new one and click on it, thus:

One quirk here is that the tunes don’t always appear in the correct order after transfer but they can be dragged into the right order within the media library window.

Do all the other transfers you wish to carry out then disconnect the I –Pod by right clicking (in this instance) ‘Tony Sullivan’s I- Pod’ within the media library’s list on the left hand side and click on ‘Eject’.
Wait for your I-Pod to show a normal display then unplug from computer.

Note that from the media libray’s list of folders you may delete folders or individual tunes on your I- Pod. You may also edit tune details and folder details.

It’s also worth mentioning that in rare instances some new folders don’t show on the I-Pod until it’s been connected and disconnected to your computer/Winamp several times. In my experience this doesn’t happen often and the folder will always show up eventually.

I’ve been using Winamp with my I- Pod for about nine months now and although this tutorial may at first viewing look complicated, after a few times, as with most software, you’ll be using it without thinking.

In my opinion Winamp is a much preferred application to I-Tunes and it recognises, as far as I know, all current audio formats including FLAC files.

 

[floppybootstomp]

I've used Winamp a lot with my I- Pod over the last few days and since posting this have realised there is an Eject button lower left, as shown in the last post picture above. So you don't have to right click as mentioned above to access the Eject function.

It's also worth mentioning that the I-Pod title bar can be right-clicked directly to access the drop-down menu, it doesn't have to be left-clicked and highlighted first which is how I worded it above.