Technogrrrl

I acquired a nifty new gadget the other day. It’s a Sansa e280 mp3 player. I got it so I can use Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go but I have a bunch of music already on an old iPod. I wanted to get all of that music onto the new Sansa with the least amount of trouble.

It turned out to be much easier than I expected!

1. Connect the iPod to your PC.

2. Right click on the [Start] button in Windows. Select Explore.

3. Browse to your iPod in the left panel and left click on it. Note: It should be listed as a separate disk under My Computer. In my case, it was called PODCASTS (F:).

4. In the right panel, double click on the folder called ipod_control.

5. Right click on the folder called Music then select Copy.

6. Right click on the directory in the left panel where you’d like to store you music and select Paste.

From here the directions depend on what application you use to synch your mp3 player. I used Yahoo Music Unlimited Jukebox. I simply added the Music folder to My Music and it organized all of the songs by Artist, Album, and Song Title. I synched my Sansa and I was in business. I had 4.7 gigs of data to transfer so it took a little while.

If you look inside the Music folder, you’ll see a bunch of other folders with your songs dispersed in no particular order throughout them. The filenames are truncated so if you try to find all of the songs from an album and move them into their own folder, it may see them as duplicates of each other. That’s the downside. Happily, the music players read the tags, not the filenames.

Another Note: These instructions assume you have Windows set to allow the viewing of hidden and system files.