Rumble Strips|You have been warned!

My youngest daughter just turned nine on Saturday and among her many b-day activities she received an iPod Nano. It’s one of the new ones with the slight oval design. Color is a nice vivid Purple.

As would be expected my oldest daughter, the suddenly former proud owner of an iPod Nano, is a bit envious. I would expect there will be some iPod requests at Christmas time this year. She had already been mentioning how cool the new Nanos are when the commercials would come on TV.

So here is where the problem comes in. You’d think, kid gets an iPod, no big deal. Well, turns out there is a big deal. The kids share a computer and now the computer manages two iPods. You have to decide how you want to set it up and then you have to set it up. Meaning I have to figure it out and set it up. Do you want to just use separate playlists for each iPod or set up a different library for each iPod.

Consider this consumer testimonial from an iPod utility software download page:

Thanks so much for your help on Christmas holiday! Last week, when I organized my hard-disk space, I deleted some folders on my family computer. The next morning, my son told me that he couldn’t find any his iPod music he backed up on the computer. My son was so upset on Christmas day and he even didn’t wanna talk with me. He said he couldn’t sync his ipod and iTunes anymore, otherwise, all his music collection would be removed. At that time I had come to know what a big mistake I’d made. Sigh…But your iPod Copy Expert gave all my son’s music back when I installed it on the computer. Thank you for your most helpful software and it really saved the relationship between my son and me.

You think it’s a stretch to say that accidentally deleting a kid’s songs from his or her iPod could permanently damage the parental/child relationship? Let me tell you, I don’t think so. I have been treading very carefully with the iPods since Saturday. The existing iPod has about 250 songs on it but the iTunes library only shows about 135 — the ones purchased from iTunes. I think the ones not purchased were lost when we moved the library from the old computer to the new computer last year. It’s a preexisting problem that until now I hadn’t heard much about. But now that I need to set up different playlists or different libraries or maybe even a complete separate install in separate user accounts, I must be certain that I don’t accidentally re-sync the old iPod that has all the ripped music on it and lose the hundred and fifty non-iTunes songs on there. To that end I suggested we turn of the automatic sync.

But now I’m hearing that new songs purchased from iTunes have to be manually synced to the iPod and my daughter is afraid it will sync the whole library and she’ll lose her other songs. I thought she was about to cry. I had to hug her and pat her on the back and promise her everything will be okay. She’s not even a little kid; she’s a teenager. It’s the most upset I’ve seen her in several years.

So I am going to acquire a utility that will back up the iPod to a computer. You can do it yourself through the MyComputer management tools but there are some utilities out there specifically for the iPod that maintain all the iPod specific file info, or metadata, like category and play counts and will allow the creation of a new library containing everything on the iPod, including the songs you ripped yourself. Right now I am leaning towards CopyTrans, a program that, you guessed, copies and transfers songs from PC to iPod.