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Minor iPod Emergency

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Well, it’s been a very iPod-centric day for me.

I manually sync’d some new music and an interview with Bruce Sterling (for more on my overall iPod “strategy” you can read this earlier post). I then walked out to the car, plugged the iPod into it’s Belkin Auto Adapter and tried to find the book I was listening to yesterday…

My only playlist was the “On-the-go” playlist, which was empty
so I rebooted it (Menu and Play buttons together)…
no music magically appeared under Playlists or Browse.
So I drove to work listening to the radio and talking on the phone, thinking that some quality time connected to the Powerbook might heal my sick iPod. But, nothing worked!

So I went out at lunch and bought a 120GB External Drive, backed up the (invisible) contents of the iPod using PodManager (which I bought, upon reflection I should have learned to use rsync), erased the iPod using DiskUtility, re-installed using the iPod Installer 2.1 and connected it to Scott’s 17 to wake it up (’cause the 12 wasn’t seeing it) and dropped the contents of the backup onto the iPod icon in iTunes…

I’m now waiting for 4142 songs to be copied across! Thank God it’s over Firewire instead of USB 1.1!

What have I learned:

  • Don’t trust the iPod as a stable place to store music and books
  • I need more semi-portable, backup-type, storage (problem solved with the 120GB drive… at least for a while)
  • Anything having to do with music or video is a HUGE time-sink, especially when it stops working
  • I probably could have gotten away with deleting the iTunesDB file from the iPod_Control/iTunes folder of the iPod, but I’m an idiot and had already wiped it by the time I found that advice on Google
  • Written by jthurber

    January 7th, 2004 at 6:11 pm

    Posted in mild-rantings