Hi Jude, The problem you ran into is not iTunes specific, but due to a full disk. When you do a copy and paste, you're storing a temporary duplicate of the contents you copy on your disk drive. If there's no space to do the copy, then that won't work. There are other ways to free up disk space in a pinch, including emptying all caches and browsing history associated with Safari, checking whether there are downloaded files you no longer need, etc.
You can transfer podcasts the same way you would other files. I would use Greg Kearney's "Move" automator action from the GUI, but if you're comfortable working from terminal and the command line, that will also work. The advantage of using the terminal and the command line with wild cards is that if you're short of space, you can specify a whole block of matching files at one time, but do the copy operation one by one, so you might be copying 50 files in your current directory, but executing this as 50 individual commands. If you did this in the GUI by selecting all 50 files, you'd have to find disk storage space for all 50 of them while your system did the copy. Here's an example. I attach a USB memory stick and check in Finder. The memory stick shows up under my devices in the sidebar as "Crucial". Finder also has a status line that will tell you how much space is available on any selected device -- that includes your Macintosh HD. Use item chooser menu (VO-I) and check "available". This works in any view (list, icon, or column). After checking the available space on your memory stick, you might want to create a folder for the transfer contents. Let's call this "overflow". On my Mac the memory stick is identified as: /Volumes/Crucial You may have some other device name in place of "Crucial". The folder I created is identifed as: /Volumes/Crucial/overflow Start up a terminal session from FInder (Command-Shift-U to Utilities, press "t" to navigate to Terminal, use your favorite way to launch app -- e.g. Command-Down Arrow, Command-O, etc.). Move to the directory you want to copy, for example, to get to your top level podcasts directory use: cd "Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts/" You can copy and paste the above into your terminal session. I assume you are starting from your home directory (the default when you open a new terminal session, or else you can first issue the "cd" command with no arguments to place yourself back in your home directory). For new VoiceOver users, every terminal command is followed by pressing the carriage return key to execute it, and case (as in capital "P" for Podcasts) matters. Again, you should use "cd" to move to a specific podcast folder, but the name you give will depend on your podcast subscriptions. For example, I might type: cd "Blind Cool Tech" where I enclose the folder name in quotation marks, and type the entire name while keeping track of upper and lower case letters. Once in the folder I can copy individual or groups of podcasts. The Blind Cool Tech podcasts all start with episode numbers in their iTunes names, which are now in the 1000 series, so a command like: cp 1* /Volumes/Crucial/overflow will copy all files in the current directory with names beginning with "1" to the overflow folder I created on my Crucial USB memory stick. Be very careful when working with wild cards like the asterisk. New VoiceOver users who are not familiar with unix or the terminal navigation should not try to use wild card file matches. A good place to learn about Terminal is the book, "Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal" that was released 2 months ago ($10 for downloadable PDF file): http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/command-line Here are some general guidelines: • Delete tracks from iTunes using the iTunes delete command -- don't use finder. That way your iTunes database will contain the correct information on what's in your library. • If this is the first time you are ever backing up your podcasts, check that you can restore a file with full information by deleting one of your latest podcasts (something you can easily get back from the feed), and using Command-O (Add to Library). When you select the file in your dialog window (e.g., by finding the podcast episode file in the overflow folder on your USB memory stick) you should get back everything except metadata like when you last played the file or how many times you listened to it. Then you can be confident that all needed information will be restored. • You can write tracks in data disc format onto CD and DVD. These CDs and DVDs can be read into any other iTunes Library whether on a Windows or Mac computer. Although you can't play these in a DVD or CD player -- only in another computer or maybe an mp3 CD pIayer that support this structure on discs that only contain mp3 files -- this works well for data storage. I also find that using iTunes to write out data CDs or DVDs is substantially faster than using Disk Utility to burn the same files, quite apart from the cross-platform support. In Tiger, if I added instructional videos to my PowerBook's iTunes library, created a playlist, and burned a CD or DVD using iTunes, the task would complete at least two times faster than using Disk Utility. It was worth adding the tracks to my iTunes library even if I never used iTunes to play the video files. Create a playlist, then either use the contextual menu (VO-Shift-M) for the playlist in the source table to choose "Burn Playlist to Disc", or press (VO-Space) the "Burn Disc" button. You can VO-Down arrow from the songs table to read the summary status line for number of items, total time, and space usage of your playlist, then VO-right arrow to the "Burn Disc" button. Choose a format of "Data CD or DVD" in the dialog window, insert a blank CD or DVD, and press the "Burn" button. Remember that you must have at least as much disc space free on your hard drive as the content you will be burning to CD or DVD. HTH Cheers, Esther On May 23, 2009, at 9:19 AM, Jude DaShiell wrote: > > I ended up with a disk that got too full so had to toss over 5,000 > podcasts into the trash then empty the trash so iTunes could work > normally > again. The iTunes would not permit me to do anything else with > them; I > tried several times to copy and paste those to a zip disk and even a > CD > but was prevented because the disk was too full. What's the transfer > procedure to run regularly so this situation doesn't arise anymore? > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
