I’ve been working diligently in my spare time to get the iPodject Companion Site up and running, get teachers and students interested in using the iPods, and setting up a web log of the process. While I sometimes wonder if this blogging thing is really worth investing any of my precious time (2-6 AM this morning, unfortunately), I do see a benefit in sharing my progress for other educators experimenting with iPods in education. I can thank my online communications with Tony Vincent of Learning in Hand and Mark van ‘t Hooft of ISTE’s Handheld Special Interest Group for that.
Currently I’m working on actually getting the audiobooks onto my external hard drive. I’ve continually run into problems with iTunes defaulting back to my C Drive rather then the external drive. After a post on the Educational Technology Listserv Ed-Tech, Dan Craig replied with this:
“It’s kind of a pain, but I’ve been going through this since getting my first iPod. I’ve never wanted to store my collection on my laptop’s HD, so it’s on an external HD.
I do this with a PC, but I’m assuming it’s similar (if not the same) on a Mac.
1) Map the drive so you get the same drive letter each time you connect.
2) Open the iTunes Music Library.xml file in a text editor (in your iTunes folder)(it’s a good idea to save a backup version at this point).
3) Use find and replace to replace the current path (your C: drive) to the external drive. Just replace everything before the iTunes folder name.
4) Sometimes I have to restart iTunes to get it to load right. I’ve also had to clear the library in the past in re-import it (save a copy of the iTunes Music Library.xml file in another location prior to doing this).
Like I said, it’s a pain, but it doesn’t take that long to do.
Daniel A. Craig
English Instructor
Seoul National University
Foreign Language Education Center, Yongon Campus”
I truly appreciate this and I will give it a chance when I get back to my school this week. Of course I need to figure out how to “map a drive” since my district technical support analysts have done this previously.
