iPod Insanity

See Update Below

I am really in a strange situation here... I've got my good ol' iPod Nano (gen 1 baby!), where I keep a lot of my tech Podcasts in a Playlist so that I can easily manage just one show at a time.

Today however, I realized that in the Windows Weekly podcast playlist shows that episode 75 is still the first on the list, but I'm up-to-date with the podcast and should have just the most recently episodes (episodes 100+) on there. So I did some checking, and it looks like the iPod has Episode 75 listed in the playlist, but nowhere else on the iPod.

I don't want to just delete it from the playlist, I want to remove it completely from the iPod. The file has long since been removed from my Mac. So the question is, where is the data file at on the iPod?

My first thought, "Oh, it must have been classified incorrectly, and is hanging out in the Music folder." WRONG. I searched there, to no avail. I even checked the Audiobook area just incase, but I also had no luck with that.

Then I thought, "Well, it's gotta be on the iPod somewhere, so if I do a 'Get Info' command on the file, I should have some rudimentary information about where the file is located at on the iPod." WRONG. Get Info did not list a single thing about the actual location of the audio file. Just gave me an indication that the file was playable on the iPod and had several variables that I could set.

That's when I realize that I might be able to push the episode from being a "Podcast" to being "Music" or something. I tried that out as well from the Get Info prompt, but had no luck. I can change the Genera, but the media type is greyed out.

I tried moving the song from the playlist to the iPod in general, but also had no luck. I tried moving it to my Music on iTunes and to the Mac desktop, but I had no luck in this at all. The only thing I can do (or so it seems) is move it between playlists on the iPod or delete the entry from the playlist (and I would rather not have the space wasted on an entire episode like that).

Googling so far has not returned any useful results. I'm not even sure what to be looking for, just trying to come up with some solution.

I'm going to keep looking, but I've got a looming fear that I may have a decision to make, either format the iPod to remove the episode, or just delete the file from the playlist and not worry about the extra space that it is taking up.

***Update
Not wanting to give up so easily, I fired up the one sure way to view the contents of the *true* file system, and not these virtual folders with hidden objects that Finder gives you, I'd use Terminal!

I enabled my root user (for just a bit, I promise) and did

AkiraBook:~indigo$ su
Password:
AkiraBook:/Users/indigo root# cd /Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03
AkiraBook:/Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03

From here, I did an ls -sk to show me the files and size in Kb. I looked though F00 to F05, but there was only one file that was close, WDXV.mp3 that was 35700-some Kb, which is really close to the 35.1 Mb that I was looking for. Not wanting to be unsure, I copied the file to the desktop and opened it. Sure enough, it opened in iTunes and said that it was "Windows Weekly 75."

I did a quick rm -v command, and it got rid of the file. The iPod now has an additional 35 MB of free space, and I promptly removed episode 75 from the Windows Weekly playlist. SUCCESS!

Good Things Come in Small Packages

But serious innovation comes in the smallest designs.

I just got the announcement today that Apple has released a new iPod. My first response: *Yawn* I didn't even look at the email. Apple keeps releasing new iPods. The newest Nano was pretty decent, but nothing major changed. Just got rid of the fat shape and replaced it with a sleek and skinny version. The iPod Classic hasn't changed in ages and there's never any big innovation on the Shuffle, since it is a pretty bland device... No screen? What can be done on a device without a screen?

Apparently, a whole lot. This new iPod (shown above, with its immediate predecessor) looks awesome. Smaller than ever before, and even though the old shuffle wasn't really thought of as bulky or fat, it wasn't really thought of as stylish. The new guy is the definition of sleek and stylish. It's got an awesome 10 hour batter (according to Apple) and uses "VoiceOver" a new technology from Apple that will read out song/album titles and with this feature, the new Shuffle now supports playlists... The first Shuffle to support playlists!

I plan to be visiting the Apple store within a week to check this guy out. My own Nano (first generation) is really showing its age, but I've loved the Nano style so much, I was really leaning toward a new Color Chrome Nano, but perhaps a Shuffle is in my future instead.

Visit: iPod Shuffle

so long, old friend

Last night, I came to the conclusion that my old iPod with Video (5G) had finally died out, it was my first iPod, my first HDD-based MP3 player, and the first to be over 1GB in capacity (my iPod was 30 GB).

The symptoms of impending failure were very minor. For about two years now, I've occasionally got the "You need to restore this iPod" message at start up or as I connected the device to iTunes, but the messages were really rare, and when they did occur, disconnecting the iPod and doing a reset (hold down "Select" and "Menu" for 6+ seconds) cleared up the issue. Occasionally, the iTunes database would be corrupted, and I would have to restore the iPod. Very annoying, but not the worst thing that could happen.

That is, until yesterday, when I synched up some video podcasts. I was getting behind on them and decided that using the iPod 5G would be the best option to get caught up -- the battery on my nano is starting to go anyway, requiring it to be on the charger more and more these days than. However, upon trying to play the video podcasts on the iPod 5G, the video would start although it would eventually have some type of processing problem and skip to the next episode or continue playing the sound while not updating the video. Sometimes, it would just give up and out-right freeze, requiring a reset of the device to get it up and running again. At first, I thought this was just symptoms of a poorly encoded video file stressing the iPod's CPU and causing it to crash and require a reset.

Unfortunately these frequent resets only seemed to make things worse over the evening. After two or three of those force-resets, the device powered back on and said that it was corrupted and needed to be connected to iTunes to be restored.

The restore went fine, but when I attempted to synch for the first time (a manual synch of a few dozen audio podcasts), the iPod crashed again and needed to be reset, and once again, restored.

But, this time, the restore function didn't work out so well. It seemed to freeze up as the iPod System Software was being installed, and even though the device wasn't disconnected from the Macintosh, the Mac said that it had been improperly removed. Retrying the restore didn't work either, the device was getting worse, freezing right after being connected via USB and by this time, it was crashing iTunes as well.

It seemed I was out of luck. None of the diagnostics said that there was anything wrong with the iPod, yet it seems to be having more and more difficulty starting up. It even seems to have trouble getting past the Apple logo and into diag mode now, which deepened my concern that the iPod was in serious hardware failure.

I'm pretty sure that it is hard drive failure that is getting to the device, but the Apple system diagnostics (upon reset, press and hold "Select" and "Previous" as the iPod is starting up), I found nothing wrong listed in the system diagnostics for the HDD... But, the diagnostics only list the SMART data for the drive, it doesn't actually do any sector by sector analysis.

I did do some research on running SprinRite on the iPod, but it looks like if I am to do that, I'll need to order special drive converters, disassemble the iPod and then attach the iPod's HDD to my computer (via IDE) and run SpinRite that way. I was hoping for an easier fix, such as being able to run SpinRite via USB, but it seems "via usb" isn't an option.

My only other recourse available last night was to run Disk Utility on the device, which returned no problems. The only remaining thing I can think of to try would be some of the Mac drive diagnostic utilities, which may have something in there that can work on a USB drive - I haven't gone though this option as of yet.

For the interim, I am more than able to just get by with my iPod nano (1G). I'll be looking forward to getting the latest iPod nano once the battery in this one starts to go so I can start watching videos on my iPod again, yet at the same time, I really will miss my nano 1G. Perhaps a trip to the Apple store is warranted after work sometime this week.

grrrPod

Meet the scourge of my week: My iPod Nano...

I love listening to music while driving, and being able to listen to j-pop and coldplay and a perfect circle all without having to change the station, miss the end of a song, or listen to the dreaded commercial is dang sweet.

However, my iPod has recently not been turning itself off after being unplugged from its headphones (it should pause and eventually go to sleep, but recently it's been playing right on through), which happens to be the most common way that I let the iPod "shut down," since actually taking the time to grab the iPod, go through the menu system, select sleep, and then reattach the iPod those extra few second that I usually spend doing something else.

My other big annoyance is that I'll frequently find the thing playing... It's like I've bumped it or something and it's started playing when it was off earlier. Recently, I've had to go as far as not only manually putting the iPod to sleep, but also putting the iPod on hold. It's an extra step that I didn't have to take a few weeks ago that now needs to be done diligently to keep the thing operating nominally. ~sigh.