I have moved my dh itunes library onto new laptop successfully but now need help with it recognising his ipod

[babyboo1and2]

I have successfully transferred iTunes library onto new laptop as old one starting to act dodgy but when I attach the ipod to it a small icon saying ipod appears next to the iTunes store icon (upper right of screen) but none of the ipod's playlists appear to the left of the screen. If I click on the ipod icon and then click the 'on this ipod' tab all the playlists appear but they are in light grey so I cant click on them.

Thanks in advance if you can help.

[NetworkGuy]

bump - hope someone with an iPod can answer (I don't own one!)

[TariffHound]

Hi,
Your iPod is a monogamous thing - it can only be "married" to one computer's iTunes library at any one time. If you want to divorce it from your old laptop and marry it to your new laptop, you should see a message when you plug the iPod into the new laptop along the lines of "iPod can't sync with the new PC since it had previously synced with a different iTunes library." You then should have the option of syncing it to your new laptop.

Be warned though that a sync to a new laptop will delete the contents of your iPod, so that it is fresh to load content from your new laptop.

This shouldn't be a problem if all the content on your iPod is stored in your iTunes library that you moved to the new laptop.

However if you have content on your iPod that is not in your new laptop's iTubes library, you need to get some software to drag the content from the iPod to the new laptop's iTunes library before you do the sync.

Apple / Record companies only want you to transfer songs to an iPod that are already in your iTunes library, they don't want you adding songs to your iTunes library from an iPod (e.g. grabbing all the music on your mate's iPod and adding to your iTunes library). Hence Apple doesn't support you transferring content from an iPod to an iTunes library if the content doesn't exist already in the iTunes library. However if you need to do this, third party software to do this job does exist if you wanted to search for it on the internet.

[NetworkGuy]

I guess that keeping music in MP3 files (and then importing into iTunes) might avoid this problem, and have the benefit that if you swap to (heaven forbid!) a non-Apple music player, the MP3s will be immediately usable.

In most cases I've seen, an MP3 or a mobile phone (running Android) just appears on a PC as 'removable storage' similar to a USB stick. So I can then just drag music off to/from the device to make copies playable away from the computer. I have only recently started using iTunes (to download some podcasts) and am glad I have plenty of other options for handling my MP3 music files.