Seems to synchronize, but after ejecting, everything is gone

Question

Hi! I am not sure if this is an iPod, an iTunes or a MacBook problem. I've had my Nano since last October and haven't had any problems up till now. A day or two ago I took some podcasts off and loaded some new ones on, all manually. When I disconnected and wanted to listen to them, they were gone! Other things were still there, music and audiobooks, for example. I reconnected it to the MacBook and got the following message: "iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod "........" Go to the summary tab in iPod preferences and click Restore to restore this iPod to factory settings."
I did that, synchronized some things and everything seemed fine until after the disconnect. They were gone again. When I tried synchronizing several podcasts and audiobooks on my husband's iMac, everything was fine. I tried it again from the iBook and got the same message.
This time after the Restore and synch everything was gone and when I connected it to iTunes again, I didn't get the message, but in the capacity bar in the summary section all the space that had been filled with blue-audio was now orange-other. There is only orange. I've repeated the Restore process a couple of times, put some audio on the iPod and ejected. Same results: nothing on the iPod and everything showing orange-other in the capacity bar.
If I remember correctly, there was a recent iTunes update and this is probably the first time I synched since then.
I would welcome any advice. It would be really inconvenient to only be able to sync things from my husband's computer.
Thanks! Kätchen

Answer 1

I have the same problem, just happened about 2 hours ago, and kind find anything to help. I have a 16GB 4th gen nano and a macbook pro. the only thing different is that in addition to the symptoms you have listed I get the "ipod cannot be restored (or ejected) because files are in use by another application".