IS THIS THE SOLUTION FOR DEAD SHUFFLES???

Question

I think I may have found a solution to the Shuffle/iTunes 7 issue that doesn't involve buying a new mp3 player or banging it on the desk lol!! I was having all the same troubles described by everyone else (flashing lights, "cannot update", not recognising etc etc..) but I could still see my Shuffle in Windows Explorer so I decided to try and load some music on just like I was loading files onto a regular Stick Drive. I clicked and dragged a couple of album files over to the drive which it accepted. Of course when I tried to play them nothing happened. The cool part is that when I turned on iTunes it now recognised my Shuffle. I loaded some music on and it worked fine for the first time since dowloading iTunes 7. I then went back into Windows Explorer and deleated the album files I had dragged across and bingo I have my full 496MB capacity and a working Shuffle. This may be a coincidence or might need to be done in tandem with something else I've done over the last 2 days or something else may have happened unbeknownst to me (an Apple update??) but give it a go if you're still having trouble - it might be the solution???

Answer 1

As Jeff mentioned, unfortunately, the info provided is incorrect. Most external hard drives do not have the ability to act as a host device. Meaning, when you plug your camera into a computer, it generally mounts the camera as a drive (or provides similar functionality). You then use your computer to pull the information from the camera. If you simply connect an external drive directly to the camera (as this solution suggests), there is no way to get the data from the camera to the drive. You can generally daisy chain firewire connections... meaning you can connect your camera to a firewire drive and if the firewire drive has multiple firewire ports, you can then connect the second port to a computer with firewire. This is not an option for you as you already know there is no firewire on the MacBook. There is some misconception that for external drives with multiple interfaces (firewire and USB and or eSATA) that you can connect a camera to the drives firewire interface and then connect the drive to your computer using the USB connection. Unfortunately, you can't daisy chain across different interfaces, the drive can only support data throughput through one interface at a time.
Still an external drive is good to have for backups, etc... but it is not a solution for your problem.