iPod iPod - 1 account seen as 5?

[spidercomrade]

I don't know if this is an answerable question or not, as it was met with some derision at the Apple support forums, but I'll try anyway. I purchased a song from the iTunes music store and attempted to add it to my iPod, since I don't have the iPod and iTunes synched, I add things manually. When I tried to put this song on my iPod, however, I received a message saying that the file was not copied because my iPod already has music from 5 separate accounts. I have only ever used my own account, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I'd like to know how to see which songs were purchased by which accounts, if I could, or any other solution to the problem would be welcome.

Thanks in advance!

 

[EricNau]

You can view the fairplay info by selecting a song, and then choosing Get Info from the File menu. It will be under "Summary."

 

[spidercomrade]

as a follow-up to that, what does the Fairplay mean, exactly? the songs i purchased on iTunes say they are Fairplay version 2. Also, I was hoping for some way to quickly find the songs that were purchased from iTunes, since i have over 10,000 songs on the iPod currently. I know which songs I have purchased, because they are in my account history. Would it help to remove all of these from the iPod?

 

[EricNau]

FairPlay is the name Apple gave to their DRM technology. Yuo can read more about it here.

All of the songs purchased from iTunes will be in the "Purchased" category in the source list. You could search through these (assuming there aren't too many) to see if all of the accounts match.

 

[spidercomrade]

All accounts match in my purchased list. All of the songs that are on my iPod are also on my hard drive, but I'll admit that they're slightly disorganized because I don't synch. I assume that all songs purchased from iTunes are protected AAC files (m4p), and I find no files of that type besides the ones I already know of because they're in my purchased list. Is there anything else that could be setting off this problem? I have music from some of those problematic Sony protected CDs, could those be affecting it in some way?

 

[spidercomrade]

obviously this is a unique problem. could other downloaded music cause it? i don't download often, but i have some. i think it's all in mp3 format, however, which shouldn't be causing the problem.