I love coming back to the iPod. It’s great having almost all of my music on one device that only does one thing: playing music.
My listening habits are much better when I listen to downloaded music than when streaming. On streaming services I tend to listen to lots of lists and I end listening to the same songs for long periods of time. On my computer and the iPod I usually listen to full albums, in order. It’s a different experience. I listen to the songs as the artist intended when publishing the album.
It’s an iPod gen 7 with the the HD replaced by a 128gb microSD. The firmware is the holy rockbox.
Oh man, I haven’t thought about my old iPods in forever. I need to go dig them out and give that a shot. Times certainly were simpler back then.
I love my iPods enormously, to the point that, while I have an Apple Music sub, most of my proper listening is done via one of these three little beauties.
The Mini and the 4G are flash modded to 128gb, both have new batteries. The 5G is a stock 30gb spinning HDD, partly because it still works fine, and partly because I currently lack the disposable income to mod it.
The 5G is actually two broken ones combined. I was lucky enough to score the 4 and 5 together from Facebook for about £12. The HDD in the 4 was cooked, so needed replacing anyway, but I couldn’t get the 5 to do much of any use, because the click wheel wouldn’t register any touches. Took it apart and found it was slightly water damaged.
So I eventually picked up another 5G with a shagged battery and broken screen off eBay for £20. Turned out the battery in my original one was actually good still, so I transplanted that and the good screen into the ‘newer’ 5G, and am now the proud owner of a perfect working 30gb iPod for the grand total of £26.
The 4G refuses to charge via USB for reasons it won’t share with me. I thought the original battery was toast, but it seems that it was actually probably fine, just wasn’t charging properly. Picked up a FireWire brick and cable for £35, and the 4G has been a solid device ever since. Purely because of the charging issues though, I’ve been pondering selling the 4G. I’ve spent about £50 on it, so if I can recoup that, then I can happily mod the 5G to 512gb and have my foreverPod. But the 4G is just so pretty, that I can’t bear to part with it…
I’ve never seen that OS on an iPod classic… looks dang cool. Too bad mines got a dead battery and a mechanical hard drive…
So nostalgic for my first i-touch needlessly jailbroken with a few dozen pirated albums on repeat!
My listening habits are much better when I listen to downloaded music than when streaming.
I find this too. If I listen on my iPods, I listen. If I have Apple Music playing, it’s just audio wallpaper. I break out The Good Headphones and choose something from a finite selection of music that I’ve curated, and I’ll sit there and enjoy it properly, without the temptation to scroll the internet while I’m doing it.
Nice, I have a iPod, but I mostly use my Zune to listen to tunes. I used to have a iAudio X5L for DAP goodness, running Rockbox even. Could play flacs for days. Loved that thing… lost it in a move though :(
So much nostalgia. I think I still have mine around too, in that same case.
I can’t remember whether this was the default behavior, but on the original iPod Classic you could browse your albums sorted by artist, and within artist by year. It’s a small thing, but it made the iPod feel like it was designed by someone who really cares about music, for someone who really cares about music, and I haven’t seen that approach replicated anywhere else in the 15 years since that model came out.
Just as a point of comparison YouTube Music by default doesn’t show your own library, and even that by default is just a hodge-podge of anything music-adjacent you’ve watched on YouTube. :(
That’s why I miss foobar so much!! You could sort and soft through your library in so many ways. I used to go through everything year by year. I’m surprised there aren’t any good standalone apps that do something similar.
I bought a FiiO M3K a couple months ago to have a Rockbox machine again, and I’m so happy. Rockbox is just such a great piece of software.
Only issue I’m having is that the SD card seems to slowly get corrupted after a while, upon which Rockbox doesn’t boot anymore until I copy it to the SD card afresh and repair the file system.
Not sure what’s causing that… Might be the SD card itself, I suppose. I should probably reformat it and try again, but it’s 512gb and copying all my music takes such a long time.
Wow that’s a lot of space!
I don’t know if it might be related but I also have problems with the rockbox disk mode. To copy files I load the stock firmware. I don’t know how your device works but maybe if you have an easy way of copying files directly into the SD without rockbox disk mode you can avoid the problem…
