Grateful Dead Music Forum

Just got my first iPod, transfered a bunch of music to my itunes, and here's the question:

Like most of us, I have a seperate folder with a bunch of random songs/shows/etc. and I would like to delete some of these from my hard drive to create more room (I am running out of disc space and am going to get an external hard drive, but until then....)

1.) So can I delete these songs/shows now that they are in itunes?

2.) Once in my iPod, if I delete these songs from my hard drive, can I DL them back to my computer's hard drive at any time? So I don't lose them....?

Does that make sense?

Meaning once the songs are in my itunes, can I delete the other files on my hard rive, and then later on, can I take them off of the iPod and install them onto my hard drive? If the songs are on my itunes AND in another folder on my desktop, are they in my computer twice?

Thanks for any help!

First off no you cant delete them even if you put them in Itunes. All Itunes does is find where you have them saved and play from there. So if you deleted them it would have nowhere to play from. Secondly you can take songs from your ipod to your pc but it can crash your Ipod. And also it renames all your songs to like YRLF LFEL HSKE and so on. So its impossible to find stuff again

shakedown_04092 wrote:
1.) So can I delete these songs/shows now that they are in itunes?

yes you can. I tunes creates its own files in its own directory called "iTunes music" where it stores all of the music files you have in your itunes library. Double check to make sure you have this directory and that its full of all your files, and then you can safely delete the others.

shakedown_04092 wrote: 2.) Once in my iPod, if I delete these songs from my hard drive, can I DL them back to my computer's hard drive at any time? So I don't lose them....?

yes you can use your ipod like a hard drive, there are some helper apps out there...google it.

If you want to save (or back up)any music that is in your itunes library what I do is convert the tracks to wav files (as opposed to the ACC files) and put them in a folder in your HD.
You can then delete stuff from you ipod or whatever and then always have them on the HD for future use.
btw if you go to the edit toolbar>preferance>advance the genral tab will show your itunes library location and in the importing tab you can change the import to wav make your copies.

on a relatred note I got a video ipod recently and was bummed to find you couldnt import dvd's there is a great free program called hanbrake that does an awesome job.

Oscillation wrote:

shakedown_04092 wrote:
1.) So can I delete these songs/shows now that they are in itunes?

yes you can. I tunes creates its own files in its own directory called "iTunes music" where it stores all of the music files you have in your itunes library. Double check to make sure you have this directory and that its full of all your files, and then you can safely delete the others.
.

Not true. Go ahead and delete the original directory files and see what happens. Next time you go to play them or move them itll come up with an exclamation point and say these files do not exist in this location. Would you like to locate them?

Blob, you're right, thanks for the heads up. Luckily, I only lost the Ratdog show I was at earlier in the year because I deleted in from the HD and then emptied my Recycle Bin. Doh!

Thanks for the heads up on all that!

PS - what do you mean by "it can crash your iPod" ??? For some reason that sounds like something I want to stay away from .

But seriously, how can it crash it? That sucks. I have a 160GB iPod that plays videos, so I guess that makes it a video iPod. I paid like $350 for this effin' thing so it better not crash!

BlobWeird wrote:

Oscillation wrote:

shakedown_04092 wrote:
1.) So can I delete these songs/shows now that they are in itunes?

yes you can. I tunes creates its own files in its own directory called "iTunes music" where it stores all of the music files you have in your itunes library. Double check to make sure you have this directory and that its full of all your files, and then you can safely delete the others.
.

Not true. Go ahead and delete the original directory files and see what happens. Next time you go to play them or move them itll come up with an exclamation point and say these files do not exist in this location. Would you like to locate them?

i don't know what you guys are doing but i routinely download music, import it into itunes and delete the original files...

maybe its a pc thing im on a mac...sorry you lost your show dude i shoulda said i was on a mac first :(

Maybe it is a Mac thing. But I dont like macs so I wouldnt know. As for the crashing I doubt it would harm the Ipod overall but you could lose all your songs in between the transfer. And possible it could do more damage. Im not positive but where I found out about this trick it said so. I did it once and it worked but like I said the file names were all mixed so it wasnt worth it at all. I believe they make programs now to extract but they arent free programs.

Oh and to comment on Oscillations comment. You can use your Ipod as a hard drive BUT then it becomes just a hard drive for those certain files. Whatever songs you put on the HD will not be playable unless you added them AGAIN to your music library as well. In other words 2 of the same song on one iPod.

Are you guys serious? I delete stuff on and off my ipod/hard drive all the time and nothing happens to the other. Just set your ipod to not auto sync and you are good to go.

strumminsix wrote:Just set your ipod to not auto sync and you are good to go.

Dumb question: how?

Still need an answer to the above question, but I did figure out what Blob/SS are talking about:

I just deleted that Ratdog show from my hard drive, and can no longer play it in iTunes, but I CAN still play it in my iPod; it's still there, I just was listening to it, but I tried clicking play on iTunes, and it says what Blob said it would "cannot be found/would you like to locate it?". Weird.

So....now that it's off of my hard drive and iTunes, how do I get it back onto my hard drive/iTunes if I want to? I think someone mentioned some programs you can DL that can do that for you - do y'all know of any off the top of your head?

ps - i hate when things (electronics especially) get complicated.

Of course its still on your iPod. Its saved on there. But if you ever had problems with your iPod its gone from your computer and youd have to get it again to reload it.

Ok - there's a lot of partially right answers here.

first - itunes will copy songs into the itunes music folder ONLY if it's specified to do so in your preferences. Go to preferences>advanced>importing and make sure to check the box that says "copy files to itunes music folder" - then it will copy everything to that one location when you add new files - after that then you can delete the original file and it will still play the songs fine. You can NOT delete the songs from the iTunes music folder though.

second - there are lots of utilities that will let you copy songs from your ipod back to your computer that work just fine. I've done it plenty of times and never had a problem. maybe some programs don't work as well with certain pc configurations - I don't know. It's always worked for me. I have a mac so I'm not sure about which utility to recommend for PC - but, for mac I use Senuti (whis is itunes spelled backwards!) - it's a free utility and it works perfect - not only does it restore music but also playlists to your computer.

third - if you do delete your music from your computer - DO NOT CONNECT YOUR IPOD TO YOUR COMPUTER. if there's nothing in your itunes folder then it will make your ipod look the same - it will erase your ipod. you'll need to start the utility first and then connect your ipod.

To find one of these programs just go to versiontracker.com and do a search for ipod - you'll find a bunch of different ones.