I use a program called XPlay instead of iTunes. iTunes just drives me insane for some reason. But I have noticed that I get skipped songs (only on my classic, not on my nano ). And I sometimes wonder if the MINI would interface better in general if I used iTunes rather than XPlay.

Any thoughts? Experiences?

 

That's a very interesting question (whether your choice of library software *on your PC* makes a difference in how the songs are actually written on the device or read in the car?)

I don't have any insight, because on the Mac side at least, iTunes works just fine and has never given me a reason to look for an alternative.

 

Try Audio Galaxy - it accesses your entire library on your home machine.

 

I've used Windows Media Player for my music library for years. When I initially installed iTunes (it's been a while, granted), my tags got rewritten by iTunes and I had to reindex everything (and I have something like 150 Gigs of music, so it's not a short process!). It annoyed me so much that I desperately searched for any alternative for my iPod. Perhaps things aren't as bad now as they were then, but I'm hesitant to try it again because it was such a nightmare.

 

Are you using the USB alone or the Y cable? It looks to me that XPlay uses the iPod like a generic disk drive. If you use the USB alone, the MINI would do the same (access it like a USB memory stick that holds mp3 files).

 

Y-cable.

 

I understand your frustration. I had the same thing happen to me. luckily i had a full back up of all my music so i could just delete and then copy all the music back to the computer. Took a while to copy it back to the computer but it was much easier than redoing all the tags.

Wow that a fairly large collection. But my collection is currently 1.32TB (yes Tera Bytes / over 120,000 tracks). Imagine having to redo all those tags.

I would make sure you have a full back up on an external hard drive before of the way it is now before attempting to do anything. Heck if you dont have a back up of it now and you dont do anything with iTunes I would make a back up of it.

Good Luck.

 

I use Winamp instead of iTunes for my pre-Touch iPods. It works great.