Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV Old iPod vs new iTunes

I have an old but perfectly good iPod 4th Generation 20GB colour screen.
It's got a mixture of music, podcasts and photos on it at the moment. I want to strip it all out (or at least the podcasts and photos) and just have music on it which I will play with it permanently mounted on a dock (so no worries about the old battery).
I have connected it to the current iTunes (12.4.3) on my macBook Pro, the iPod appears but I can't seem to synchronise anything or delete items on the iPod.
I have also tried putting it into disc mode which does mount on the MacBook Pro but doesn't show the photos or the music or the podcasts for me to delete them.
Any suggestions?

As I have fully embraced iCloud, I had not synched any iOS device through iTunes in a long time, but intrigued by your question I tried with my iPhone (iOS 10) and iTunes 12 (MacOS 12) and had similar results to yours except I was unable to induce the iPhone to mount as a drive at all. So in spite of my normal inclinations I went directly to the last resort, iTunes Help and found...
From there I went to iCloud.com ➭ Help and after some searching found…From there I searched out a copy of the manual for your 4th Generation iPod Touch (iOS 6.1) and from that the best I can come up with is you must delete each item manually on the iPod Touch.

Other than that, the best I can offer is to revert to OS X 10.9 on your Mac, which I cannot recommend.

Thanks, that's helpful, I appreciate your searching. My 4th Gen is actually an iPod click-wheel (not a Touch) and I can't delete anything from it without iTunes.
It's now stuck in Disk mode............. this is not going well!!

Ok I have managed to get it out of Disk mode and remembered that it actually came with a firewire cable when I bought it back in 2005. I found a firewire cable (not the original, but one I used to use)............. and I still have the same problem!!
The iPod appears in iTunes (on the left) it shows all of the contents but I can't delete anything or add anything. It did try to sync but said that the iPod need more space. I didn't actually want to sync it with my iTunes entirely just the music and there is enough space for that.

The iTunes Help quote was not specific to a particular iPod model, so it is clear any current version if iTunes is not going to work. Apple's obsolescence model puts your iPod at least three or four years outside of any support window and any Apple product or service that would support it would be purely coincidental. 😢

If your Mac will run a version of OS X prior to 10.9.3 and you have or can get a copy of that version of OS X, you might consider creating a boot drive with that OS X version, booting from that and using that version of iTunes to manage and synchronize your iPod Touch. Not an ideal solution, but it should(?) work.

What you may want to do then is do what I do on my iPhone.

Create a playlist in iTunes. Put the songs you want to have on your iPod in that playlist. Instruct iTunes to sync that playlist. Then, when you hit Sync, it will delete anything from the iPod that is not in that playlist, and it will add whatever songs are in the playlist.

That's done it. I now have a single playlist on the iPod which I can change via iTunes.
Thanks for all of the help.