Reader Larry Grossberg pines for the old days of iPod preferences. He writes:
When I plugged in my iPod and iTunes opened in versions of iTunes prior to iTunes 7, it gave me a list of all the songs on the iPod (as well as the total number of songs), which I could compare with my iTunes library.Now, in iTunes 7, iPod preferences shows only how much memory is being used in its graphical display. Is there any way to get the list of music on the iPod and/or the total number of songs back in iTunes?
Sure. To see what’s on the iPod, simply select the iPod in iTunes’ Source list, click the triangle next to it to reveal its Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Audiobooks, and playlists entries, and select one of the entries to see what it contains. (Naturally an iPod that doesn’t display video won’t include Movies and TV Shows entries.) Unless the iPod is configured for manual updating, all items in the main window — songs, for example — will be grayed out, meaning that you can’t do anything other than look at them. With an iPod configured for manual management you can do things like select tracks and press your computer’s Delete key to remove those selected tracks from the iPod.
As for viewing the total number of songs, all you need to do is click the Capacity Bar in iPod Preferences. Click once and you’ll see how many songs and videos the iPod holds. Click it again and it tells you how long it would take to play the audio and video the iPod holds. Click it one last time to return to the amount of storage each kind of media consumes.