1) Turn on the FS on iPodB (an option when it is plugged into PCB)
So it's impossible.
You misunderstand. Perhaps I should have started with:
Ensure mass storage is enabled on both iPods. Once that is true you can copy files off both iPods on any PC you want.
What you're saying is that unless you have access to BOTH the PCs the iPods are synced to you can't transfer music at all.
Nope, not at all. As long as the iPods are visible as a file system to the single PC you care about, you can copy all the files off the iPod.
If you need access to BOTH PCs, why bother? Just move the files PC to PC.
You only need access to "both" PCs in the first place in the same sense you need both PCs in order to populate the iPods in the first place.
This is clearly seems deliberate to me. Apple really doesn't want you to share music.
No, you are just misunderstanding my instructions.
Apple doesn't care if you share music, they just don't make it the primary function of the iPod.
Um, the problem definitely existed seven years ago when this feature was first unveiled, and as a solution it definitely worked.
No it didn't. I had an original Rio PMP300, and MP3Man, the first MP3 players ever made and neither had this problem (they didn't do any metadata though).
Um, those systems couldn't handle 5GB of songs (or roughly 1000 songs). When you need to parse 1000 songs, you need some kind of magic when you have a 60MHz CPU...
I had an original Archos and it didn't have this problem, and it was a slow HD-based player AND did metadata and on-the-fly playlists.
Ugh, when I first got the iPod I could tell it was literally 10x faster than the Nomad and Archos my coworkers had.
For one thing, clicking on a genre/artist/playlist did not spin up the HDD. That is literally a 1/10th second difference between the iPod and most other HDD based players.
Since it was a mass storage device it also meant the filesystem could not contain anything other than straight ASCII (and limited at that), so the files HAD to be mangled if the file had apostrophes, diacriticals, etc.
This makes no sense at all. The filesystem most MP3 players use is FAT32, iPods (I think) originally used HFS+, now they use FAT32. FAT32 supports almost exactly the same character set as NTFS (the only possible 3rd filesystem here) so the filenames on your PC SHOULD work on the iPod, just as they do on EVERY OTHER MP3 PLAYER. Special characters and Unicode are meant to be handled in the metatdata, the ID3 tags.
Um, I had Japanese music files from Japanese music CDs that contained Japanese characters. Experience (and this document) says FAT32 could only store/display 8 bit DBCS characters... unicode was stored in special metadata folders/directories
There is simply no need to mangle the filenames and metadata into ASCII gibberish for "performance" and there never was.
If you say so. My experience was it worked. My training in CS also tells me that a hashtable is going to be faster.
Where did it insert hash data?
Into the tags. Last time I imported MP3 files into iTunes the song, artist, and album names in the ID3 tags were replaced with random ASCII strings (which I assume is hash data). Album art was stripped too.
Bizarre. Never happened to me.
