Help! my green iPod is very sick!

[mseydel]

I just received an iPod Mini a few days ago as a gift. Right out of the box, I loved the packaging and Mini itself, if not the documentation and speakers. I've never had an iPod before, so I took the time to follow the instructions and power it up via the wall jack before trying to load my tunes.

Once charged, I plugged it in to my G4 Dual 867(OS 10.3.3, iTunes 4.1), and the automation took over and randomly selected about 800 songs and copied them to my iPod. Though I found this a bit strange, I've never had a Pod before. I couldn't change the playlist of the Mini, though, as it was greyed out...again, odd, but I figured I was doing something wrong. The tunes(almost all are .mp3s) copied flawlessly, and for a day and a half I was digging my Mini. The charge was dropping, so I plugged it back in to the same Mac via FireWire 400 to recharge.

When I went to eject my Mini, I noticed that iTunes reported that there were no songs on it. I though this was a glitch and ejected it. It powered up ok, and the charge was at full, but all the songs were gone. I tried re-connecting, but while the songs will copy and appear to be on the Mini, they are not showing up at all when I disconnect; upon reconnect iTunes show it completely empty again...umm, WTF?

 

[DeltaMac]

Did you upgrade your iTunes on your G4? The mini comes with iTunes 4.2, I think, and the latest version is 4.5 The Mini may require at least version 4.2 to operate properly. You can also try resetting your iPod and starting over.

 

[dlloyd]

I would say reset the iPod.
To answer something else you mentioned in your post: the contents of the mini are 'grayed out' because you don't have the iPod set to manual updating.

 

[mseydel]

I typed it in wrong...I'm actually running iTunes 4.5. I reset the Mini to factory presets, but it did the same thing where it just automatically dowloaded a chunk of my Music folder that would fit on the Mini...

 

[Randman]

As dloyd said, make sure all the software is updated, and then check to see if you have it set for manual or automatic update. I don't have a mini yet but I believe it will try and fill your hard drive with music already listened to in iTunes.

 

[Ifrit]

Hm, to disable automatic syncing click on th ipod preference button below in itunes (see attached picture) and check the third option button in the following dialoge.