I’m having trouble transferring songs I’ve downloaded from ITUNES. Does anyone have experience with this? Thanks!
It all depends on how you downloaded them. If you got Mp3 then you can use another program to transfer to the fuze in MTP mode, or you can use MSC mode to drag and drop them. If you got ACC then you need to get them to mp3 format. You can use Itunes to convert them or you can burn them to a CD and re rip to Mp3
People have asked this a lot, so I’m going to try to be comprehensive here, and update this if anything isn’t clear.
iTunes’ default format is AAC, which the Fuze doesn’t support. If you have iTunes plus songs or have imported as AAC (the default), you can convert them to MP3 in iTunes just by right-clicking on the song. There are also two types of purchased songs: “Protected” and “Purchased”. “Protected” is the format Apple used for years; its designed to make it hard to put them on anything but an iPod.
First things first. To convert anything to MP3, you have to change your import format (Edit menu->Preferences->Advanced tab->Importing->Import Using). iTunes plus songs are 256kbps, so you’ll want to increase the Setting to a custom setting of 256kbps.
Now, Right-click on the column headers (Artist, Album, etc), and you’ll be presented with a whole bunch of choices. Click on “Kind” to add that column. Click on the “Kind” column header to sort your songs by type.
You can select all songs of Kind=“AAC audio file” and “Purchased AAC audio file”, right-click, and select “Convert Selection to MP3”. This may take awhile if you have a lot of songs.
Now the hard part - the Protected AAC files. You’ll have to put these in a playlist, burn them to an Audio CD (or CD-RW, slow but re-usable), and re-rip them to remove the nasty “protection”. They’re at 128kbps, so you may want to reduce your import Setting to 160kbps (since AAC is a little better quality than MP3). You’ll want to do all of this in iTunes, because typically only iTunes will recognize what you’ve burned to that CD. Select File Menu->New playlist. Create a playlist (I call it “burn playlist” ). Drag files into this playlist until it reaches close to, but not over, the size (in minutes) of the CD. Make sure you burn it to an “audio” CD, not a “data” CD. Once that’s done, rip it with iTunes. Since your import format is MP3, it’ll create MP3s from that disk.
Now you’ll have a whole bunch of files of Kind=“MPEG Audio File”. This is iTunes’ way of saying MP3. You can just drag those onto your Fuze (under the MUSIC directory if using MSC mode) if you don’t mind them all being in one folder.
Note: the folder structure has absolutely nothing to do with the menus on the Fuze, but a folder structure can make it easier to maintain the music on your Fuze.
If you want a decent folder structure, you can use the command line. This is a little more complicated, but not much. You will have to be in MSC mode for this to work. Click on the windows Start button and select Run (or in the fill-in box just above the start button on Vista), and enter cmd. A black box will open; this is the command window. Now go back to iTunes, Edit menu->Preferences->Advanced tab->General, and select everything inside the folder location box. Right-click and select Copy. Go back to the command window, and enter cd " then click on the icon on the very top left of the command window (it looks like a little C:). Select Edit->Paste. The folder name you copied from iTunes should go there. Hit Enter. Now enter this, substituting the drive letter for the drive letter of your Fuze: xcopy /S *.mp3 f:\Music. Now all your music should be in artist/album folders on your Fuze.
After this, you can continue ripping CDs and purchasing songs with iTunes, but its not a very good idea. At least anything you rip at this point will automatically be in MP3 format. You’ll have to repeat some of this process to get it to the Fuze, and make sure you don’t get duplicate files on the Fuze.
Message Edited by bdb on 03-23-2009 08:25 AM
Thanks for posting such a detailed explanation on how to get music into the Fuze. Just curious couldn’t you just copy over your music folder which would already have files stored by album and artist etc.
I’ve got a number of iTunes playlists and my music is stored as mp3s, I’m wondering if it’s possible to get the itunes playlists downloaded into the Fuze.
Thanks.
