I asked a question about transferring bird songs and photos to an iPod last night. The question wasn't answere and, funnily enough, is not shown in the forum. Do you just disregard awkward questions, in the hope that the (in my case) disgruntled customer will go away? 

The question is (and was): why is it that when I go to Custom List Manager I find that the 'Prepare for iPod' option is grayed out, i.e. unavailable?

It seemd so easy when I first looked at it, until I got an iPod this week and tried to do it and then found it's just not possible.

Please allow for the fact that I'm not all that clever and give SIMPLE instructions on how to transfer bird songs and photos to an iPod nano.

Please also have the courtesy to answer my question. 

Forum questions are posted automatically. You need to log in to post a Fourm question. We never delete a Forum item that is asking a valid question. I love awkward questions - we usually end up fixing an issue in the next release or rewriting the Help file to make something easier to understand!

The "Prepare for iPod/PDA" is grayed out only if you have not selected a Custom List. You may have many Custom Lists, so the program needs to know which one you want to export. Click on the name of one of your Custom Lists. The birds on that list will then appear in the box on the right. Now click File --> Prepare for iPod/PDA.

The next screen that appears will let you display the bird names as "First Last" or "Last, First", in other words, do you want to see "Yellow Warbler" or "Warbler, Yellow". The help file under Custom List has an article on exporting to an iPod. We will try to make it clearer that you need to select a Custom List before exporting.

Here is a hint for those of you with iPods. Create a Custom List that includes all the birds. Just open the ID Wizard. You will see that all 925 birds are there on the right before you start clicking on anything. At this point just click "Save as Custom List" at the top of the screen. It will take a minute or two, but all 925 birds will appear in your custom list. Now click the Custom Lists icon and select the new list with all 925 species. When you click export to iPod, it will export all 708 songs (some of the seabirds and very rare birds do not have songs)

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the reply, which (after 16 hours) I managed to work out for myself before I saw your reply.

It appears to me, that there is a fault in the way information is worded. The bit about first creating a Custom List only occured to me, when all else failed. That wee bit of information was the key, but whilst your answer is very very clear, I could not get that advice from the info on the eviewer.

I was getting to the desperate stage and had hoped to be able to save the information to an MP4 player (still don't know if that can be done - and would like to know) and spent the money on an iPod, in the hope I won't be totally lost when I'm in Arizona at the end of next month. Make no mistake; your software is fantastic, I'm only complaining about not geting any clues as to how I could open the iPod information. To me, having the 'Prepare for Ipod' grayed out just beat me altogether.

Thanks for replying  and being so helpful.

We need feedback like this to let us know where we need to rewrite the Help files. Something that seems perfectly clear to me (after spending 14 years using and improving this software) may not be quite as clear to others. So, we just need to say it in a different way or emphasize something a bit differently.

We are soon going to be adding v3.9 How-To videos to the web site. This topic will be the first one posted!