Next Issue Please

After finishing the computer switch, my next tech task was to sync my iPod with the computer. The computer already had the bulk of my music on it, roughly duplicating what was on my computer at home. But since iTunes doesn't let an iPod sync to more than one computer, I had cheated, sort of. I used a freeware utility called Senuti (get it?) that works in reverse: it pulls music off an iPod and loads it into iTunes.

I could have just left it alone and continued using the iPod with the songs and playlists from my old home computer. But being stubborn, I wanted to have everything matching and up to date. Unfortunately the computer didn't want to cooperate. Each time I tried to sync the iPod to the iMac, it would choke on a random song during the sync process and I would get an "unknown error." Each time it was a different song at a different point in the process, so I did not believe I had any corrupted files. I gave up for a couple of days, tried again, and got the same result.

I had already been thinking about upgrading to the newest Apple operating system, which came out a couple of months ago (something my old computer didn't have the specs to handle), so I thought that doing that might eliminate the sync problem. Turns out it did, though I don't have the slightest idea why. Now the only issue is that my iPod is full, but I have a lot more music in iTunes that won't fit.

I think the solution to that might be to spend $25 a year to sign up for iTunes Match, which mirrors your entire music library in the cloud. That would let me play my music through my iPhone without having to have the files physically stored on it, which would be great because the iPhone's capacity is half of the iPod's.