iPod Problem

Yeah, so, this is probably hopeless. But my six month old iPod, full of albums from my ex's collection that I don't have access to, just started saying "No Music," "No Video," etc. I manually manage my music in iTunes, it's set not to sync and I never hit the sync button; the music is STILL ON THE IPOD when I mount it as a drive, it's just being recognized by the iPod or iTunes. ITunes wants me to "restore," which apparently is a euphemism for "delete everything and start over." Don't wanna!

I could copy everything from the iPod to the PC... except the iPod hard drive is twice as big as the PCs.

So has anyone had this happen? Is there ANYTHING I can do that doesn't involve spending tons of money I don't have right now? It's apparently a somewhat common issue, but I can't find anything on Google beyond "LOL SUX 4 U" or "just delete everything and re-synch!"

from my recent jailbreaking experience, i think if you do a restore and not a restore to factory settings you wont lose anything. when was the last time it was backed up?

can you afford a cheap external hd?

ipod problem - i lost it in the snow over the weekend.

i was briefly tempted to replace it with a Touch, but since my main use is listening to music & podcasts on the way to work, i'm worried it won't have enough storage? i don't want to worry about deleting music because i took a video or downloaded a game to fuck around with.

Hawkwind: Classic, Touch or something else? It used to happen monthly on my iPhone but never once on either of my Classics.

Classic 7G. I opened it in SharePod and it resurrected a little bit (plays, but some of the artist listings don't appear under Music, and some of the song titles are alpha instead of by track number). Going to try to buy an external HD, yeah, as that seems like the easiest course of action.

Chris - when you click the "Restore" button does it give you more than one option? I didn't want to pull that trigger without knowing what was going to happen.

This is a very silly thing to consider a problem. But my ipod is not showing pics of the albums anymore (except at random one in ever couple dozen will display the cover of The Associates "Double Hipness" totally at random (none of the things displaying this are The Associates)). I tried restoring it & still no album covers. ????

Reformat - reload.

Agree with micarl. And props for owning "Double Hipness"!! It really was something, Stephen!

Oh, and make sure you're using the latest iTunes (or your media organizer of choice).

I tried restoring it & still no album covers. ????

Is this the same as reformatting?

AFAIK they are the same but I'm doing it again – we'll see, eh?

I don't think it is - reformatting clears off everything whereas restoring still keeps special files the iPod needs. You can format the iPod like any other drive using the appropriate system tool.

oh godddddddddd what is happening i don't understand

okay, plugged ipod in exactly as usual to sync. midway through it ejects itself, the warning that the device hasn't been unplugged properly flashes up even though I HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING. it's frozen on "do not disconnect" so i do the thing of holding down menu + the centre button to restart it. ALL THE MUSIC IS DELETED. i plug it back in, it tells me to restore factory settings, i do so, start to sync all the music back on it. it carries on fine then with only 200 or so songs to go (out of 3000) it DOES THE SAME THING AGAIN.

what is it doing! why! this is something i do all the time, why is it fucking me around?

your ipod cable is bad, probably? if not that, then your ipod's dock connector is probably fuct

it might be the cable, that's like 5 years old now. ipod itself is only a few months old!

this sort of thing only ever happens when i'm in a massive rush to leave the house, not those times when i have acres of time stretching in front of me

I've definitely had ipod cables go bad - always the newer ones. the one I had from like 6 years ago still works fine, but I rarely use it

is it pretty definitely the cable rather than the ipod itself though?

oh god now itunes has frozen. EVERYTHING ON THIS COMPUTER IS MALFUNCTIONING RIGHT NOW.

well I dunno - it's the first step I would try in troubleshooting the problem though!

WHY

does my ipod refuse to play certain mp3s that work fine in itunes? it's really weird - when i click on them on my ipod it sort of pauses at 0:00 for a couple of seconds then immediately skips to the next track on the album, and repeats the process without playing any sound. why would it do this to me? how can i get the little fucker to stop doing it?

Sounds like the file is corrupted, although I don't know why in that case it plays fine in iTunes. Maybe the read process is different or something, idk. Can you re-download or re-rip the files? I would try a fresh copy of the file.

Hmm when my ipod started doing this it was because the hard drive was failing... if it's that then the solution will probably be to buy a new ipod (or in my case buy something else).

hmm, it's only done it for two albums ever, one a couple of years ago and it hasn't failed yet...

Might be worth running a disk check on it anyway to rule it out? I'm sure there are other reasons it could happen, not necessarily that.

Another way to test it would be try to copy the file it skips on from the ipod back to your computer, when mine stopped working I would get data cyclic redundancy errors if I tried to do that.

a disk check on the ipod? how do you do that?

you do it on the Mac, go to Disk Utility when the iPod is plugged in and it should show up there as a disk

don't you get error messages that certain files were not transferred when syncing with the pc (or apple computer)? i had a similar problem with a couple of old mp3s (mpeg layer 2). the way i solved it was to convert them to mp3 and delete the old files. afterwards the syncing worked fine. maybe a firmware update on the ipod could help too but i haven't done that yet.

Might also be a syncing issue?
I'd set all my music syncing to manual, or at least I thought I did, until it became clear that iTunes purchases (songs) on the laptop were automatically transferred to my iPhone. Resulting in songs/albums ending up there twice, since I manually transferred them as well. I've tried two things: selecting and deleting the doubles, or deleting them all and retransfer them manually. Now there's a Young Smoke album and a partial Charles Mingus album that don't play when I select them, like lex, on the iPhone. The files play fine in iTunes on the laptop. Funny thing is that these files do not show up in my iPhone list when I've hooked it up to the laptop, WTF. Basically there are files that I can't play when I see them on the iPhone and I can't remove them because iTunes doesn't see them...

xxposts

lex how old is your ipod?

no error messages, syncing is manual (the mp3s with these issues aren't itunes purchases), ipod is...about 1.5 years old i think?

so it should be playing mp3s pretty solidly out of the box

it's only with specific files, yeah?

yeah. all files on specific albums (only two ever) (one of those was an official mixtape)

i've had dodgy mp3s recently so i reckon it's that. you can get hold of apps that fix mp3s but i can't think of one to recommend off-hand; maybe someone else here can

did you already try to convert those files to mp3 in itunes? that should do the job if they play in itunes.

My iPod sometimes skips wav and aiff files that play fine on iTunes. Just need to convert them.

they are mp3s already

the ipod has skipped wav files before but i assumed that was just cuz they're huge

i know. but as i said before, they might be not readable by the ipod but readable by itunes. just have a try.

this happens to me all the time with rap mixtapes, very frustrating & mysterious

Changing tags has helped fixed playback issues for me in the past.

like add some text to a meaningless tag and see if it fixes it.

Should be set at 44.1 kHz and 16-bit...but I forget where those settings are.

I've had those problems pretty frequently, and my solution was to just make another copy of the mp3 in iTunes using the Create Mp3 Version tool, and when that didn't work I'd open the file in Audacity and save a fresh mp3.

I am iPod touch curious. My Classic is still healthy & strong, but phone battery life is nowhere near strong enough for me to consider going that route (also, I think the iPhone 8 has a lot of other assy, hateable qualities and I want to keep my 6 for as long as I can).

is iPod touch battery life anywhere near iPod Classic's? I assumed it was not, based on iPhone battery life.

The more I explore the alternatives the more I realize I'll sacrifice a lot of nice-to-haves for the sake of really long battery life.

This whole conversation is so depressingly 'I understand that your kidney is giving out, how about we replace it with this beer can with a whistle glued to it'.

― Scott Staph (Old Lunch), Thursday, September 21, 2017 10:50 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark

i normally do not enjoy hyperbolic analogies but i am feeling this
having my ipod working is very much like having an organ i rely on working

regarding ipod touch (or old iphone being used as a pseudo ipod touch) - is the experience of dragging music from your computer's iTunes library into the phone's library any less torturous and buggy than it used to be? The last time I tried to do so in earnest was like mid 2013 and stuff was always appearing grayed-out and unplayable in the phone library and then impossible to delete. I gave up on the iphone-as-music-player partly because of that.

at least we have started the conversation. i feel less freakish for loving my ipod so much!

no dude it is uncommon but there are plenty of us with this unholy passion

re: dragging and dropping, I don't know if it's any less buggy now (or if it's even still an option for managing music), but after having the same problems you describe I started using sync rather than drag and drop and haven't had an issue since. I have a playlist called "iPhone" and put whatever I want on the phone in there, and set iTunes to only sync that playlist to the phone. Works perfectly every time now.

can you make playlists on it?

or put playlists on it? instead of just that one playlist i mean

You can identify any playlist on your iTunes as one to auto-sync to the phone, I believe... earl can confirm

you can, it's just another playlist. I think iTunes automatically does that (or at least it used to) if you plugged in an iPod for the first time that didn't have enough space to sync everything. It would automatically create a playlist based on what albums you actually listened to. it was kind of nice.

LL - I have one playlist just for the iPod (I've got way more than 160gb on my hard drive), then a bunch of other playlists, you just sync em all.

so maybe LL can get a used or hand me down 128gb iphone 6

thank you all very much for your tech support :)

Yeah, you can sync multiple playlists. Aside from my main playlist, I create smart playlists that automatically update to include all songs from the main list that I've rated 5 stars or "loved," or songs I've played fewer than say five times, etc. I really wish you could create smart playlists within the app on the phone. Sometimes I do miss the simplicity of the iPod interface and click wheel, but now that they've worked out most of what used to annoy me about music on the phone I don't know that I'd go back if I could.

also for the buttons in pocket thing, most headphones now include commands for play, pause, skip, volume, so not really an issue anymore

a lot of earbuds do but most over-ear and on-ear do not, right?

old lunch and lechera, totally with you in this recent revive

the shorting battery trick for the wall plug made me go mad when trying to revive my last ipod

recently managed to revive mine and feel the same as everyone else here esp Old Lunch's "I understand that your kidney is giving out, how about we replace it with this beer can with a whistle glued to it" analogy

zero interest in streaming services

I figure I have at least another couple years with this one, but after that it's gonna be sadtimes I expect

Fine, okay, I will finally invest some time in figuring out how to get one of my handful of old iPod classics working and let y'all know when my new business is officially open.

now you're talking
you live in chi area iirc? don't be a stranger!

I figure I have at least another couple years with this one
don't drop it!
that's what happened to me everything was going well and then there was a collision with the sidewalk :(

Gah, I finally had to break the glass a few months back on the emergency iPod I bought when they ceased production of the Classic, and I've already dropped the thing, what, 3? 4 times? Butter. Fingers.

(Yeah, I'm local, LL. I'm probably only like a mile away from you, iirc. I need to be occasionally reminded that people interact with one another outside of their homes and workplaces.)

i traded a coworker for her old ipod nano! this thread helped me get over some of my obsessive fear about this. i know the problem isn't going to go away, but at least i have a plan. yay!

People are selling unused 7th gen classics on ebay for like 200 uk pounds, seems reasonable to me

The nano is a nice little imp. Of course its modest capacity will force you to sweat who comes on and off your library but that contest can be fun if you're not mentally ill in the way I am.

it's not going to totally solve my problem -- how can i carry the collected works of ____ in my bag at all times just in case? -- but it will help for the time being

Nanos are great, forces you to switch up your library and I find I actually listen to the same albums consistently. Whereas a 30 gb or more is too many options for me personally. I dunno I want to avoid ADD listening streaming trends, I've seen how it's affected my friends - they hardly even listen to a full album now

I dunno, it's been super nice listening to hour after hour of Tara Jane O'Neil's discography today but it's also super nice knowing that that isn't my only option.

Fair enough, I totally get how it could be limiting

the best thing to do with an ipod when you don't know what to listen to is just go to alphabetical list of songs, pick a good starting spot, and just let it go

just as good as random + you get a funny list of song titles

^^yes!

I gave in and bought an iPod Touch 128GB this week. While my 16GB phone works fine in the car - where I do most of my listening - sometimes the limited storage frustrated me. Started filling the Touch yesterday and after it felt like I'd put a lot on there's still 75GB of storage left!

ipod crapped out couple months back and now i'm a convert to iphone/itunes combo, which has made it a lot easier (take the plunge). little weird to play the entirety of an album tho, it tends to shuffle songs - anyone know how to turn that off?

When you have something playing, go to the large album art playing screen (if you're not there, click on the small album art in the lower left corner) and scroll up. You'll see the shuffle and repeat buttons appear and you can turn shuffle off. If that's not the issue, only other thing I can think of is maybe your track # metadata is missing, which you can fix in iTunes. In my experience the tracks play in alphabetical order in that instance.

i absolutely hated my few months of trying to use my iphone as an itunes-driven music player

Rejecter that fixed it! Cheers.

Yeah Jon the transition hasn’t been smooth