News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 1, 2007

troubleshooting

A fix for MP3s that won’t transfer to your iPod

Posted Mar. 1, ’07, 8:13 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Troubleshooting

Sync errorEver run into that dialog at right? Often it’s understandable: you might have a few errant files in your iTunes library that aren’t compatible with the iPod (I’ve got some left over MP2 files from way back in the day). But not for the first time I got this error message in reference to what, as far as I could tell, was a perfectly legitimate MP3 file. And not only wouldn’t it sync, but if I switched to manual mode, it wouldn’t let me drag it to my iPod either.

You see, the transfer mechanism in iTunes appears to be a little bit sneaky: it doesn’t rely on the file’s extension to prove whether it’s a compatible format. Rather, it uses the metadata embedded in the files: the type and creator codes that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s been around since the OS 9 days.

The problem that I had run into is this: these were MP3s that I had listened to in Safari, via QuickTime, then downloaded. When I chose “Save as Source…” from the QuickTime plugin, they were saved as MP3s, but QuickTime stamped them with its own file type and creator codes: MooV and TVOD respectively. I snagged the free iLikeYouMore, which lets you view and edit these codes and took a look at my other, working MP3s; they use the MPG3 type code. iTunes will apparently only transfer MP3s if they’re using that file type; the creator code doesn’t actually matter. I changed the file type on the files in question and shazam, my files would now transfer to my iPod. I’m not sure if QuickTime or iTunes is the culprit here as far as intelligent operation goes, but it’d be nice if this was fixed sometime.


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