The one gift I got this Christmas/Channuka was a new iPod. Technically, I got several gifts that I didn't like and took them back to get it, but whatev's…I got it.
I have had an iPod since the day they came out for Windows. I mean, this thing looks vintage. It's big, its scratched up, and it is dirty. But my biggest problem is that I have WAY too much stuff to fit on its 20 gigs. I would of replaced it years ago but I knew the iPod with video was coming and decided to wait.
So I got the iPod, and the first order of business was to figure out how to get my TiVo shows on to it. This was accomplished using Engadget's Article. The basic outline is:
- Strip TiVo Metadata (pretty fast…about 10 minutes)
- Convert MPEG2 to MPEG4 (looonnng…1 hour per 1 hour?)
- Add into iTunes. (fast)
So that chewed up my first 10 gigs of space :(.
Now onto my music. I decided to just transfer my main music folders without really qualifying what I liked or not, just because I *thought* I would have plenty of space…NOPE. Somehow I have about 60 – 70 gigs worth of music. UUUGGGGGH.
It wasn't too bad since 10 gigs are electronic music I don't even have catalogged and 5 more is just music I don't need to have on the 'Pod. I trimmed the fat, and took it for a spin.
I noticed that although I have programs that download album art to my hardrive, not all my songs displayed them while playing on the iPod. After a little research, I figured out that you gotta embed the image in the song itself, and that is how the iPod displays them.
I looked around at different programs to download and embed the art, and settled on iPodSoft iArt. Although the iTunes Art Importer is free, I thought $10 was worth the extra ease of use and few additional features.
After I updated all the albums, I noticed iArt could also download Lyrics for all my songs. These also get embedded in the mp3. 12 hours later, that was completed.
So this morning, I was excited to view all my changes. The album art is great and worked fine. But I couldn't figure out how to view the lyrics for the life of me. With a little research I found Adding song lyrics to Ipod which states:
- On iPod, start playing any song to which you've added lyrics.
- Press the Center button repeatedly. The number of times depends on if you have artwork or not. Here's the order of things when you press the Center button:
Play status > Scrubber > Album Art > Lyrics/Description > Rating
Wow…I had no idea those menu's were even there!