I have a 2G 20gb Windows ipod.

I do occasional retouching for a photographer who has a Mac.

At his studio the other day, I thought it would be a good time to charge the ipod. I connected it to his firewire. Itunes automatically popped up and the ipod showed up on his desktop.

I cancelled out of all dialogs, but itunes briefly showed my music. I closed itunes and let the unit charge.

At the end of the day, she was all charged up and ready to go.

Walking home, I decided to play a particular tune. It wouldn't play. Nor would any other songs by that artist. Poking around a bit, I discovered that any song I had that was originally an mp3 would no longer play. The 1200+ AAC files I'd encoded recently played fine.

When I got home, I connected the ipod to my PC and found that all my mp3s had been "converted" to AAC...yet the ipod wouldn't play them.

I did a database check with Ephpod, which reported there were 1500+ songs that were non-existant...in other words, all the mp3s.

In short, I had to wipe the ipod clean and transfer everything again.

This time it kinda sucked. My copy of the Sveta trialware had expired and the only way to get the AACs onto the ipod was by changing the extension to m4a or something like that. That worked ok, but the tags got hosed. Sveta keeps the tags intact.

Anyone experienced anything like this?

Anyone figured out a free way to transfer AACs while maintaining the tags?

thx,

Rob