Monday, 11 December 2006 at 19:31
Not very web-orientated this one, but it has made my iPod immeasurably more useful, so if you’re a Mac user and haven’t already figured this out it may well be worth reading on!
Previously my 20GB fourth generation iPod would only follow me around when I went on long journeys, but now it travels with me most days of the week. With Mac OS X being my platform of choice, the natural thing to do when I was setting up my iPod was to leave it on the default Mac format. The trouble is that Windows can’t read the Apple filesystem, known as HFS+, so the usefulness of using the iPod as a portable hard drive was limited to Mac machines. If you plug a Mac formatted iPod into a PC, iTunes just says it can’t read it and asks if you want to zap it to PC format.
Now this isn’t such a bad thing, depending on which PC format the iPod ends up as. Windows has two main formats for drives; FAT and NTFS. NTFS would be a problem as Microsoft have never released full details on how it works, meaning manufacturers on other systems can’t write complete drivers to use it. This means that while OS X can read NTFS disks, it can’t write to them, which would scupper my music collection. But FAT32 has been around for a while, and Mac OS X can read and write to it with no troubles, so guess which one iTunes uses…
HOWTO: Multi-platform iPod
- Make sure you have all of your music safe on your Mac!
- Connect your iPod to a PC and start iTunes
- iTunes will complain that it can’t read your Mac iPod
- Choose to zap the iPod to Windows format
- Once complete, turn off iTunes auto-open and auto-sync
- Turn on hard drive mode
- Delete any music that might have scurried across
- Right-click the iPod in My Computer and go to properties
- Check that the format is FAT32
- Eject iPod and sync with your Mac
The Mac, thankfully, doesn’t complain at all that you’re using a Windows formatted iPod. It just happily syncs your music to it and the icon sits on your desktop waiting for your files.
Apple don’t recommend this, but I’ve been using it without a hitch for weeks now. The only issues are that the drive isn’t journaled for Spotlight and the drive name is capitalised, but I can easily live with that.
Strangely, this is probably only news to Mac users. Any PC iPod owners using a Mac would be able to pop their iPod straight on and it would Just Work. ;o)
For those people out there who use Pro Tools, there’s now an additional option. If you have upgraded to Pro Tools 7.3, you’ll find that any HFS+ formatted drive will work on your Windows PC.
Digidesign now include drivers to make Windows compatible with the Mac format; although obviously this is only any use when shifting files between machines you use Pro Tools on. Nevertheless, it should relieve a big headache for studios and at £30 it’s better value than a separate product such as MacDrive 7 (£25.34) if you want the latest features of Pro Tools bundled in too.
Is there a way to get the songs off of a mac formatted ipod to a pc without having a Mac to use?
You’d need something like MacDrive to be able to read the Mac filesystem, I believe. Then you’d need to use an app like Music Rescue to pull the files off the iPod. YMMV and there may well be freeware ways of doing this, but I’ve not looked into it much I’m afraid!