iPod and iTunes Hacks

Use Your iPod with a Mac and a PC

Listen to music on and transfer music between multiple machines and multiple platforms.

Back in the day, you were either a Windows person or a Mac person. Of course, some of us are still that way, but many of us live in a world where we have to use a Windows box at work and have a Mac at home. Others have just recently discovered (or rediscovered, with OS X) the Macintosh and have decided to purchase one for home use. Either way, can’t we all just get along?

Well, when it comes to the iPod, yes—but not necessarily out of the box. Apple snobs now have permission to raise their noses a tad higher: a Windows iPod goes from Windows to Mac with aplomb, but try it the other way around and you have a problem. Why? Because the Macintosh operating system, probably due to its minority status, can read Windows-formatted disks (the iPod is, after all, just a hard drive), while Windows (perhaps due to its majority—read, monopolistic—status) cannot read Macintosh-formatted devices.

When Apple first started selling Windows iPods, they sold a Mac version and a PC version. Apple has since changed that model, so that now you buy the same iPod for either platform. The difference is that when you plug an iPod into a Mac, it is good to go. With a PC, the drive is reformatted to a PC device (see “Use an iPod with Linux” [Hack #46] for more details on how this works). ...