Music

A profuse amount of profanity aside, we finally have an answer to a question that has been on my mind for several weeks now: who will surrender first, me or the iPod. And that answer is? The iPod gave up first!

Phase I was largely a head scratching affair, never having owned one. Nor in fact an Apple anything until my iPad Pro 2018. After much waiting on shipping however, I found the device to be a progressively hackwittery filled experiment.

First, the dandy screen that iPods apparently give when the battery is so dead that it has to charge before you can actually do anything at all with the iPod. But hey, that’s not so obscure that you can’t STFW to learn about it, so sure. Later, I would also learn that this screen occurs if you power up an iPod without the battery connected, but that’s getting ahead of my tale.

Secondly, while the device did eventually power itself up there was no stability. Attempting to connect to any machine including an equally old PowerPC system was met with failure, and PCs declaring that it failed to enumerate. That was a pain, but of course the damn thing would boot loop for about 10 to 20 minutes whenever turned on until eventually getting to the menu. Getting into the diagnostics mode to check hard drive info would only spew gibberish! Even when left running with the handful of songs it came with running, I would come back later to find it boot loopy in the morning.

An iFixIt tool kit, a torn up halberd, and a new love for plastic guitar picks and my pocket knife later, I managed to get the device open. But unfortunately the read the instructions first instructions for the SD card adapter it came with actually have fuck all info, and I had expected the board’s ribbon connector to be a pop top like most ribbons connectors I’ve ever seen in electronics (and apparently the original iPod hard drives as well). So I ended up damaging the connector on the board.

Several days and a new iFlash Solo in the mail later, I finally was able to try again only to get nothing, even after reseating the ribbon cable which was original and glued down at the motherboard end. A week of waiting for that in the mail aside, and still gibberish reading from the SD card adapter board. It only showed 96 GB and random stuff, along with locking the device so hard that a power pull of the battery connector was required. Well, at that point it’s either got to be the board or the card, so let’s reach for the collection of SD cards.

Sure enough the moment I replace the SanDisk 128GB card it came with, I can read hard drive data from diagnostics mode! It read the Transcend 64 GB card from my old Samsung tablets just fine and dandy. For shits and giggles, I used the 1G PNY card that was like the first or second SD card that I ever bought almost 15 years ago–worked just fine! Reaching for the various Samsung cards (2GB, 64GB, 512GB) in the spare cards bin, the only one it wouldn’t read was the 512. Okay, so either the board doesn’t handle larger SDXC cards or the motherboard is a model that uses wonky LBA addressing.

Big whoop there because I can probably melt the device’s database before a 64 GB card is filled up, and part of the point to this experiment is the lack of storage capacity left on my phone 😗. Key the next problem: nothing will actually recognize the phracking thing! I tried a bunch of different things with the SD card, trying to format it APM/HFS similar to the card it came with and trying dd recovery with MBR images still widely available, but nope. Ironically, when I dd’d a mounted disk utility image of the old card to the new card over /dev/rdiskN it booted perfectly despite the 128G image -> 64G card lobotomy, but still nothing would recognize it. The most that I could get with various dd and disk utility fun times was for the iPod to boot to the recovery screen or the ready to disconnect screen.

If I could just get it recovered, I knew it would be a win at that point.

I can’t say that I expected my M2 MacBook Air or the new Apple Devices app on Windows 11 to recognize the device, which they do after solving the problem. But I had expected that my iBook G4 running Tiger would work, especially after rolling it up to iTunes 9. Nope, nope, nada and the horse I rode in on. That was the point where I figured the only things left to putz with were the generic iPod sync and charge cable the device came with, and replacing the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard or something else to try the cable with would mean acquiring another, and opening this 5th gen made me glad that I didn’t buy one of the metal ones!

Queue the final count down: use an Apple branded 30-pin iPod cable, and everything works. Even more concerning than the amount of time and effort sunk into this project is that Apple still sells these cables. Another two days and a delivery later–the moment I plug it in, guess what? It’s recognized. SMH, greedy fruit companies and their MFI cables I suppose.

More curiously, both the Apple Devices app on W11 and my Mac running Sonoma offered to restore the iPod. I kind of hoped for the former, assumed the latter wasn’t likely, and expected to be reaching for my old iBook G4 again. Turns out that even on an M2 with Sonoma, you can restore an iPod classic from Finder…it’s just a buggy wreck.

Having to pull the cable, replug, and insert a hard shutdown to get the Mac to kill the hung iOS sync services later, I was able to trivially hook up and sync purchased and imported music through Finder. Long as I used the bloody Apple cable.

Once my music was synced, I decided that my choice of “Test” song was emotionally a good choice:

Totally forgot how appropriate the music video was, but in the name of more fun I’ll be enjoying the rest of the Funhouse album.

One upside of sorting through old CDs, is the opportunity to restore files that kind of disappeared two or three laptops ago. Another, is content for a recent experiment but that’s still a work in progress :^o.

Something that I also find curious is how tastes have changed. Less so my taste in music, more so my taste in interfaces. The last time that I ripped and organized these CDs, I had my own fairly strong notions of how things should be organized–and it mostly pissed me off. It’s hard to have a very uniform, tightly organized music collection in my experience. And experience has shown that often one method is as good as another until you start to stress specific problems like the maximum number of files in a directory, so meh.

My archival structure is more or less based off Plex’s format with a relatively lax level of adherence, since it’s easier to just import things like a Steam soundtrack as is, and a stack of old CDs is too much effort to value to sit around writing scripts to munge into the desired filesystem structure.

Which kind of brings me to two things that surprise me. One is that Apple Music will happily import audio CDs despite the emphasis on streaming subscription, and it’s a pretty snappy decoder. MPEG-4 containers with AAC-LC is perfectly acceptable to me as a format today due to the level of openness and support, and the iTunes Plus profile of 256K is good as anything shy of giving me a FLAC file. The other thing is that I don’t hate how Apple Music munges my rips, so much as I don’t care how Apple Music munges my rips.

The last time that I really touched anything Apple and music ripping was probably iTunes 6 or 7, which at the time was ‘current’, and let’s just say that XP was still sexy back then. Most of my friends liked iTunes, and not to big a surprise since most had an iPod even if few had Macs. But I was very perturbed by how iTunes wanted to assert its own definition of how to organize my content instead of obeying my system. Combined with being more of an XMMS / Amarok / MPlayer kind of guy, suffice it to say that I was never a fan of iTunes as a media player nor a library manager.

Fast forward to today, and what’s the real big difference there? Well, honestly the way that Apple Music manages imported CDs seems about the same that I remember from almost 20 years ago. The difference? I don’t want to manage my music through a file system. It doesn’t do my life well to organize such things in terms of files and directories built around tracks, albums, and artists and any other hoopla–no, it’s about the data model not about fitting that model to the file system.

It’s actually a lot like my contemporary relationship to notes taking over the past decade, and Android/iOS software in general. I don’t really want a model built around files when a model built around data is more practical. The obvious consequence of course, is that means decent tools. If you can’t do better than find/grep and so on then don’t bother making a fucking interface!

If files are a natural model to a problem: good. At some level most things should be files because we have good tools for working with files and it’s a fundamental aspect of data storage. But raw files are bad at metadata, at search, at relationships, and a host of other things that are more database like or more structured in nature than a stream of bytes. Files are good at storing that information not expressing those concepts, even more so when portability is a consideration. So while I still don’t like the way Apple Music organizes content anymore than I did iTunes, I can appreciate that it provides a reasonable interface particularly for the import part.

And of course the archival path is still tossing the resulting files into my own structure, lol.