How to put itunes songs onto an sd card

I've been rating the songs in my iTunes library since I first started using it, so I sort my songs by number of stars. When I learned my pickup had an SD card reader, I decided to create SD cards for 5 stars, 4 stars, etc.

Option 1

No editing involved. Easier, but defeats search and sort in the truck's card player*.

1. In iTunes, make a playlist of songs you want to have on the SD card.

NOTE: Beware of the dreaded circled exclamation mark. It appears randomly (it seems) beside the song title in iTunes. It means you've tried to play it and iTunes couldn't find it. If you try to drag a group of songs and one or more of these marked songs is included, the action will be ignored by the computer. You either select only non-marked songs to drag or, as I prefer, select all the marked songs and delete them first. Then any or all I transfer later go smoothly.

2. Open your playlist, select all, and drag them en masse onto the SD card. This could take a while if you have a lot of music.

* You'll notice many songs have numbers in front of the name after you drag them. These are track numbers etc. that Apple doesn't show within iTunes menus. If you don't get rid of the numbers your SD card player will have trouble searching and you'll have trouble finding a particular song you want. However they'll still play.



Option 2: Longer due to editing but search and sort in the player works. Costs $3.

1. In iTunes, make a playlist of songs you want to have on the SD card.

2. Buy "A Better Finder Rename". This program modifies file names. It can strip unwanted characters from the song titles in your iTunes library, like track numbers. I do this so the SD card reader in my pickup can search by the actual name properly. Otherwise, the search function is hampered.

3. Create a new folder on the desktop to hold the songs from your playlist.

4. Find and delete the circled exclamation mark songs.

5. Select the songs you want and drag them into the new folder.

6. When they've all been copied to the new folder, select all the songs in the folder and drag them onto the Better Finder Rename app. Decide what characters you want to lose and enter them in BFR. For me numbers and punctuation are the first to go.

7. When you're happy with the renamed list of songs, drag them onto the sd card.