Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 March 21

= March 21 =

Transfer music from iPhone 4 to latest iPod
23 years working in IT and I have been trying to resolve this with the help (?) of Google and Youtube since 5am this morning (it's now nearly 4pm where we live)

Husband has an iPhone 4 (I think) with lots of music on it. Daughter has a new iPod (not sure what model but the latest) bought for her birthday.

I want to get the music from the iPhone onto daughter's iPod (so she can annoy the heck out of us with One Direction songs).

I've somehow managed to sync the applications (although not all have downloaded as the iPod is 16 gig and the phone is 32 gig) - am assuming that's the problem. Unfortunately Candy Crush has downloaded so that's a whole new set of stress!

I have been reading these boards for the past few months (one of the few sites not blocked in work) when work is slow and I am throwing myself at your mercy. Please, please, please can someone give me some simple unambiguous instructions on how to do it?

If anyone can help I promise to help improve the Encyclopedia starting with working on the article about our current location (please don't reveal based on IP) which definitely needs some work. I'll even sign up for a user account if I can think of a snappy name!

217.164.75.123 (talk) 11:31, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Apple usually makes things easy, but I've gotten the impression that it's deliberately hard (if not impossible) to get music off of an iPod (and perhaps also an iPhone), because of course they (and more importantly the music companies they're licensing music from) don't want you sharing music that way.


 * I have successfully gotten music off of an iPod by mounting it as a USB disk and copying the music files to my computer, then reimporting them into iTunes. But this was a somewhat dicey process which I am not necessarily recommending for the faint of heart.  Also I'm pretty sure I've noticed that when mounting an iPhone as a USB disk, the music files do not show up, again presumably to discourage this kind of sharing.


 * (Obligatory disclaimer: even if you can get it to work, copying music files freely in this way may violate the terms of your iTunes, iPhone, or iPod licenses, and the as-yet-unratified 28th Nothing-Is-Unconstitutional-When-It-Comes-To-Protecting-Copyright Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.)


 * The obvious thing to do would be to mount the iPhone in iTunes, drag the music you want from the iPhone to iTunes, then mount the iPod, and drag the music to the iPod. (Me, I prefer manually dragging just the music i want to transfer, so I try to always uncheck the "automatically sync device" option.  Your preferences may vary.)


 * Anyway, sorry not to have provided any "simple unambiguous instructions" -- although I'm not sure there are any in this case. --Steve Summit (talk) 19:11, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much for taking the time to answer. It's a similar one to that I got from a contact back in the UK. Unfortunately it's completely immaterial now as my husband decided I was obviously being a stupid female and decided he'd take over and managed to completely wipe all the music from the phone, sigh. 2.50.167.60 (talk) 09:34, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * This is troubling. You should not allow anybody to promulgate the idea that you are any less qualified to understand or operate your technology on account of your gender.  There may be many reasons why the technology fails to serve your needs - Steve Summit has excellently explained some of these reasons - but it is not fair to blame the problems on you.  Next time, direct your husband's attention to our Wikipedia article on logical fallacy.  Nimur (talk) 15:53, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Photo management software
I have a rather large photo collection (~100,000 items), and have been trying to find ways to better manage it. I have previously been using Windows Live Photo Gallery for tagging, and it generally works fairly well, however it's got to the stage where I have so many tags I can't keep track of them, and there are little things which annoy me, for instance heirarchical tagging is only useful for a limited number of characters before it's impossible to tell what tag you're adding because the lowest granularity won't fit in the dropdown.

What I want is a photo management software with the following features: I don't need image editing capability (I already use Photoshop for that).
 * People tagging
 * Heirarchical tagging which automatically adds all parent tags
 * Heirarchical tagging with multiple parents, along the lines of the Wiki category system, where eg "London Underground" might be found within "Railways" and "London".

Does anyone know any good software I can use? -mattbuck (Talk) 13:30, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I use digiKam. In resent years, it has improved to the point that it does everything that you can probably wish for. digikam features--Aspro (talk) 13:47, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Hm, I just tried the latest version, using only ~200 photos, and it crashes if you try and resize the left side bar. I think I'll have to give this one a miss. -mattbuck (Talk) 18:03, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * why is it, that when a widows approved app crashes it OK because its the bestest software in the whole universe but when a non-widows app crashes its something to steer clear of? Just asking.--Aspro (talk) 21:24, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * This is a nice example of an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Not uncommonly, the words "why is it that" often actually mean "I don't like it that" or "It's unfair that". --Steve Summit (talk) 22:26, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
 * OK then, rephrase: For what reason?--Aspro (talk) 02:04, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll answer on your talk page, because I don't want to distract from this thread further. --Steve Summit (talk) 06:53, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * [Apologies for the above distraction -- please don't let it deter you from posting other examples of photo-management software. I'm interested, too --Steve Summit (talk) 06:53, 22 March 2015 (UTC)]
 * Thinks what steve meant was: “please don't let it deter other editors  from posting other examples of photo-management software.”  The word “You” addresses the original OP. This is a  not a nice example of an interesting linguistic phenomenon but a failure of..... – “Oh! I can't be bothered to ague out this  silly nitpicking  toss that steve is trying  to engage me in” --Aspro (talk) 21:28, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Picasa is one I've seen people use before. It didn't seem to bad but I don't use it myself so I have no idea if it has any of the features you mentioned. Image organiser has a list. BTW, I can't speak for others but if software crashes on the first go, I may give it another go, try an older version, or do a quick search to see if there's anything obviously wrong, but if it happens again very fast when I try the same thing, I'll probably give up on it too, whether it's free or paid, unless it has something I'm desperate for. (If it's paid and I actually paid for it, I'll may ask for support and if they can't help, a refund.) Not sure why people would or should forgive software if it keeps crashing and you can't actually use it except with great care, just because it's free. Ultimately software should be functional, not a political statement. Nil Einne (talk) 17:29, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Firefox
Does a fork of Firefox exist whereby the Firefox UI and the Gecko rendering engine are separate processes that work in tandem, rather than rolled into one firefox.exe process? My Little Question Can&#39;t be This Interesting (talk) 20:26, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Check out the Electrolysis project, which is similar to what you described. Currently, Electrolysis is enabled in Nightly versions of Firefox if you want to experiment with it. Just note that Nightly is the bleeding-edge version of Firefox with the latest features, but it can also be unstable and have bugs in it. On the other hand, by using Nightly you're helping Mozilla to make Firefox better! --107.9.39.168 (talk) 00:26, 22 March 2015 (UTC)