Mark songs in iPod/iPhone for recognition in iTunes

Question

Hi,
over the years I accumulated a lot of music. Now I want to use my iPod function on my iPhone to mark specific songs so I can change some metadata within iTunes later on.
I tried to make a smart playlist in iTunes which shows me all tracks that have been modified in the last week and a rating of no stars, so I could change the rating on my iPod application to zero stars. But it seems as if changes to the rating on the iPod are not registered as "modification". Therefore this solution wont work to identify these songs.
I don't want to use the on-the-go playlist for this, neither do I want to give all songs a star rating.
Any ideas how I can mark specific songs on the iPod so I can recognize them in iTunes later on?
Help is very appreciated.
Pep

Answer 1

The easiest way to compare the songs in itunes to the song on your ipod is to select the first song in your itunes list, scroll down hold shift and select the last song in your itunes list. This will select all of the rows and columns, then hit ctrl C to copy open excel and do a ctrl V to past this in a spreadsheet. From here you can delete the unwanted columns, such as artist, song length, etc. Next, in itunes double click the ipod icon in the right column of the screen, this will open a window with the contents of your ipod, then do the same operation here, select all, copy and past to excel, delete unwanted columns, now you can order these from a-z and easily compare the contents of itunes vs your ipod.
As for your other issue, the only think i can think of is that maybe some of the songs after the upgrade are in a different format that your ipod does not accept. This may be a place to start after you find which files are in itunes that are not in the ipod.
Regards,
bestncbc