I have just bought an ipod shuffle and have downloaded itunes etc...this is my first apple product and i very very unimpressed so far.

All of my music is currently on Windows Media Player which automatically stores the songs in order with album covers etc... which works faultlessly.

It is a different story with itunes. I want to transfer some MP3 albums / songs from WMP to itunes etc... but itunes won't let me transfer them (is it because it's part of microsoft? the competition)
When i do upload or tranfer an album to itunes it seems to get the album songs order all mixed up?

when i try to obtain the album cover for the album in itunes it is very hit and miss and most times it can't find the album cover to download . I want to view the songs in album order but the songs are all over the place.

i have spent a few hours messing with this and it should not be this difficult !

why on earth can the ipod shuffle not just be compatible with WMP or just be able to be connected to the computer as an external hard drive so that you can just drag and drop?


is anybody else having these problems?

Just sort your songs by album, album year, album by artist or many or the others that you can use. iTunes will only find album artwork if it matches the description of the album in the iTunes store. If your tracks are poorly labelled then it will be hard to sort them. Otherwise you'll have to use on of the many other tools that can do the same job. Are you sure the songs are actually mp3 or are they wma?

Windows Media Player won't work with Apple products. You would be better off re-encoding your songs with iTunes in MP3 format. Windows Media player has probably stored them in protected WMA format. You'll need an iTunes account to retrieve Album Artwork ( you don't have to buy anything)

http://www.apple.com/uk/support/ipodshuffle/

"iTunes for Windows cannot import or play WMA files that are protected by Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM). These files usually come from other online music stores. Additionally, Windows Media Player encodes CDs to protected WMA format by default, though you may change that"

Thanks for the replies.

The above link to apple has helped me sort the problem. I eventually read through the trouble shooter category and by right clicking on a song or group of songs, selecting "get info" i could then select the "info" tab and learnt how to alter the inherent errors to rename album, songs and rearrange song order and group songs together into one album doing it manually, which when then searched it finds album cover etc... time consuming but now songs are organised.

I have to say that WMP seems to work without me having to do any of this and even finds very obscure album info and covers.

I thought i would buy an apple as my next computer but now i have experienced itunes i a having doubts. Maybe i will stick with microsoft.