Glad to see this has a happy ending. I still have my 160GB classic from 2012 and update it regularly. You’re right, the software is incredibly finicky, and I had to buy a special adapter to plug it into the newest MacBook, but I consider the whole thing to be a labor of love. You can’t put a price on listening to music that can’t be interrupted by a text message!
“By Spring 2014 I’d heard rumors and was dreading that the iPod Classics’ days were numbered, so I’d taken the trouble to stockpile a number of spares before the axe came down.”
This reminds me of an acquaintance a while back who was really into his LaserDisc collection. He had a whole home media system set up, presumably with backup hardware in case parts broke, etc. His dedication was impressive. LaserDisc must have played a crucial part in his childhood because he swore it sounded/looked better than any other format, including Betamax which he assured me he’d thoroughly tested, which left me wondering how someone who’s gainfully employed has the time and dedication to actually compare LaserDisc vs. Betamax and really suss out the difference. Then I thought “it’s actually really good we have these people around with these kinds of niche interests”. So kudos to you for keeping the memory of the iPod alive. With any luck, by the time we’re old there will already be a “bring back those retro iPods” movement, and Apple will start producing their “Vintage 2014 edition iPod”, then you can sell the originals that you’ve stockpiled and retire a wealthy man.
When I interned at CBS News in the mid-2000s I was expecting it to be gleaming and modern, but the complex was kind of a ramshackle dump. One of my favorite places was a cavernous room where they kept all sorts of vintage media players running so that they could still access footage on long-defunct tapes and cartridges. I'd assume that's gone now and everything has been digitized, but it was a magical place.
Man, i’d give a lot to be able to rummage through the archival footage of a large media company. Who knows what you might find? This is just my intuition but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say there’s probably a lot of really significant and interesting things yet to be found, kind of like how some medieval monk rummaging around the monastery library might find a lost copy of Lucretius (maybe not that significant but you know what I mean).
Well, one of my tasks as an intern was to watch and catalog endless tapes of the b-roll used as generic filler in news packages, most of which was not very scintillating. A lot of it was either footage of fat people's midriffs for reports on obesity and diet drugs and slightly blurry footage of playgrounds for reports on education or whatever.
But in the sub-basement, which you had to access a particular elevator to get down to, the bare concrete walls were lined with endless aisles of magnetic tapes containing every single episode of 60 Minutes, the Evening News, etc. I'd imagine there are some real gems and time capsules in those that have gone basically unseen for decades.
My iPod was killed by Apple! I tried to upload a specific song into my iPod to use during a wedding ceremony I was asked to perform for friends out on a lake. Trying to upload the song locked up my iPod. Apple said “ oh, your iPod is 3+ years old. We no longer support it. You are out of luck.”
So, When my iPod was killed by Apple during that update attempt I sought out an alternative and purchased a PONO player. ~ This player has performed very well for a decade now . Though I also soon became disappointed with this player when very quickly the support disappeared and I could no longer upload new music files to it. However , It still has about 50 albums and I can still decide when and where I hear whatever music I care to. That control is Invaluable to me.
While I was relatively late in coming appreciate genius of Dylan I had the pleasure of seeing Dylan and band live 50+ times in the last 3 decades. l last saw / heard Dylan this past Sept on the Outlaw tour outside Buffalo NY. First time hearing Desolation Row live. I still laugh when I remember him tapping the microphone with the wrench to pace the song for the band. I guess!
Yikes, I'm sorry to hear that. At a certain point I accumulated so much music that I could no longer automatically sync an iPod without killing it, and I ran through a couple before I realized that, but fortunately that was for units I'd bought immediately beforehand that were still under warranty. You are the first person I've interacted with who had a Pono, I was excited when I first heard about it but decided to stick with vintage iPods when I learned the capacity was 128 Gb rather than 160 or higher. I'm sorry it's developed connectivity issues.
50+ times, that's amazing! I've seen Bob three times: once at the Bonnaroo music festival, which has become a relatively well-known bootleg for its unusual setlist; once at the University of Rhode Island; and once at Jones Beach amphitheater on a double billing with Wilco. Hope to see him again in the near future.
My iPod Nano bit the dust too soon but my ex-boyfriend, perhaps in a fit of guilt, was able to get my songs off it and for awhile I could listen to them through Spotify on playlists. Now a lot of if not most of those songs have disappeared (in particular some acoustic Elliott Smith and some Frank Black and Jack White deep cuts). I also had an extensively curated iTunes library on my 2006 MacBook Pro (including the entire Tool catalog) and then the battery in the MacBook dramatically exploded one night in 2016, months before I succumbed to owning an iPhone but years after I got rid of the original CDs.
I wouldn’t go back to the old days of having to buy this shit a la carte but relying on a digital subscription library for music definitely has drawbacks.
If you still remember names and dates, you may be able to find a lot of that acoustic/deep cut stuff on Youtube and rip it to Mp3 with an online tool. I feel your pain, I had some catastrophic crashes early on in my music-collecting career to the point that I started obsessively backing up on the regular.
My iPod Classic didn't die so much as refuse to connect with iTunes. I found work around software but it wasn't the same. I used mine primarily for podcasts. Podcast on the iPhone are OK but not as good as on the iPod.
Yeah my ability to connect with iTunes was getting finicky in the last year or two, I could usually make it work but would sometimes have to unplug and replug a couple of times for it to be recognized.
Wait a while, prices will probably go down I had an original original one that used a hard drive. Finally gave up the ghost. I guess it's all streaming now though that limits your choices to put together what you want to listen to as opposed to what's being steamed at the time. I am somewhat surprised that no one has made a clone. It did have competitors at the time.
I had a number of iPods over the years, none of them lasted as long as this one. The battery finally died as opposed to the hard drive itself, whereas I was more active with the previous ones and the hard drives would get corrupted after a while. I am also surprised that some sort of competitor hasn't emerged, even it were expensive and somewhat clunky I would think there would be enough music aficionados to make it still commercially viable today.
Ah, seems like a future Kickstarter Project. A group called "wearerewind" is attempting to bring back the cassette player in Bluetooth form. Google it. So why not a notanipod?
If Apple would be willing to license the design, I think somebody could make a tidy profit manufacturing a retro nostalgia iPod that looked just like the original but had more storage, a touch screen in addition to the wheel, wi-fi connectivity, etc. The problem from their likely perspective is it would provide an alternative to their streaming business.
Used to curate 8 hours of music when working my shift, so iPod classic was great with the large storage. But now due to changes at work I’m reduced to YouTube & Relisten & LMA
I once worked in a window factory warehouse that was about evenly split between white and black workers. So each day would be classic rock radio in the mornings and hip-hop/R&B radio in the afternoons.
Like many others I like to listen to concert recordings, especially on the date that it occurred. Today was January 9th. Thus today Bowie 1997-01-09 was spinning
What was formerly iTunes, now music app on Mac works for me for now. each am I just search for today’s date. But since someone was posting about ABB 1973-12-31 today, starting my shift with ABB then GD 1970-01-10
I keep my uptempo workout music on my phone for when I run, and I could fit more than I do, but there's no way anything but a dedicated device could store every song I might want to hear at a given moment.
Glad to see this has a happy ending. I still have my 160GB classic from 2012 and update it regularly. You’re right, the software is incredibly finicky, and I had to buy a special adapter to plug it into the newest MacBook, but I consider the whole thing to be a labor of love. You can’t put a price on listening to music that can’t be interrupted by a text message!
Cherish every moment!
“By Spring 2014 I’d heard rumors and was dreading that the iPod Classics’ days were numbered, so I’d taken the trouble to stockpile a number of spares before the axe came down.”
This reminds me of an acquaintance a while back who was really into his LaserDisc collection. He had a whole home media system set up, presumably with backup hardware in case parts broke, etc. His dedication was impressive. LaserDisc must have played a crucial part in his childhood because he swore it sounded/looked better than any other format, including Betamax which he assured me he’d thoroughly tested, which left me wondering how someone who’s gainfully employed has the time and dedication to actually compare LaserDisc vs. Betamax and really suss out the difference. Then I thought “it’s actually really good we have these people around with these kinds of niche interests”. So kudos to you for keeping the memory of the iPod alive. With any luck, by the time we’re old there will already be a “bring back those retro iPods” movement, and Apple will start producing their “Vintage 2014 edition iPod”, then you can sell the originals that you’ve stockpiled and retire a wealthy man.
Out of my cold, dead hands!
When I interned at CBS News in the mid-2000s I was expecting it to be gleaming and modern, but the complex was kind of a ramshackle dump. One of my favorite places was a cavernous room where they kept all sorts of vintage media players running so that they could still access footage on long-defunct tapes and cartridges. I'd assume that's gone now and everything has been digitized, but it was a magical place.
Man, i’d give a lot to be able to rummage through the archival footage of a large media company. Who knows what you might find? This is just my intuition but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say there’s probably a lot of really significant and interesting things yet to be found, kind of like how some medieval monk rummaging around the monastery library might find a lost copy of Lucretius (maybe not that significant but you know what I mean).
Well, one of my tasks as an intern was to watch and catalog endless tapes of the b-roll used as generic filler in news packages, most of which was not very scintillating. A lot of it was either footage of fat people's midriffs for reports on obesity and diet drugs and slightly blurry footage of playgrounds for reports on education or whatever.
But in the sub-basement, which you had to access a particular elevator to get down to, the bare concrete walls were lined with endless aisles of magnetic tapes containing every single episode of 60 Minutes, the Evening News, etc. I'd imagine there are some real gems and time capsules in those that have gone basically unseen for decades.
This is a wonderful piece of writing. Salute!
Thank you!
stumbled across this. Not exactly an iPod but... a modern version of the old cassette deck.
WE ARE REWIND
26 Rue montcalm
75018 Paris
France
store+67858170120@g.shopifyemail.com
My iPod was killed by Apple! I tried to upload a specific song into my iPod to use during a wedding ceremony I was asked to perform for friends out on a lake. Trying to upload the song locked up my iPod. Apple said “ oh, your iPod is 3+ years old. We no longer support it. You are out of luck.”
So, When my iPod was killed by Apple during that update attempt I sought out an alternative and purchased a PONO player. ~ This player has performed very well for a decade now . Though I also soon became disappointed with this player when very quickly the support disappeared and I could no longer upload new music files to it. However , It still has about 50 albums and I can still decide when and where I hear whatever music I care to. That control is Invaluable to me.
While I was relatively late in coming appreciate genius of Dylan I had the pleasure of seeing Dylan and band live 50+ times in the last 3 decades. l last saw / heard Dylan this past Sept on the Outlaw tour outside Buffalo NY. First time hearing Desolation Row live. I still laugh when I remember him tapping the microphone with the wrench to pace the song for the band. I guess!
Yikes, I'm sorry to hear that. At a certain point I accumulated so much music that I could no longer automatically sync an iPod without killing it, and I ran through a couple before I realized that, but fortunately that was for units I'd bought immediately beforehand that were still under warranty. You are the first person I've interacted with who had a Pono, I was excited when I first heard about it but decided to stick with vintage iPods when I learned the capacity was 128 Gb rather than 160 or higher. I'm sorry it's developed connectivity issues.
50+ times, that's amazing! I've seen Bob three times: once at the Bonnaroo music festival, which has become a relatively well-known bootleg for its unusual setlist; once at the University of Rhode Island; and once at Jones Beach amphitheater on a double billing with Wilco. Hope to see him again in the near future.
Totally agree. The iPod was the hight of music technology.
My iPod Nano bit the dust too soon but my ex-boyfriend, perhaps in a fit of guilt, was able to get my songs off it and for awhile I could listen to them through Spotify on playlists. Now a lot of if not most of those songs have disappeared (in particular some acoustic Elliott Smith and some Frank Black and Jack White deep cuts). I also had an extensively curated iTunes library on my 2006 MacBook Pro (including the entire Tool catalog) and then the battery in the MacBook dramatically exploded one night in 2016, months before I succumbed to owning an iPhone but years after I got rid of the original CDs.
I wouldn’t go back to the old days of having to buy this shit a la carte but relying on a digital subscription library for music definitely has drawbacks.
If you still remember names and dates, you may be able to find a lot of that acoustic/deep cut stuff on Youtube and rip it to Mp3 with an online tool. I feel your pain, I had some catastrophic crashes early on in my music-collecting career to the point that I started obsessively backing up on the regular.
My iPod Classic didn't die so much as refuse to connect with iTunes. I found work around software but it wasn't the same. I used mine primarily for podcasts. Podcast on the iPhone are OK but not as good as on the iPod.
Yeah my ability to connect with iTunes was getting finicky in the last year or two, I could usually make it work but would sometimes have to unplug and replug a couple of times for it to be recognized.
still have mine. Just because they discontinued it doesn't mean you can use it or find used ones for sale
True, but they've become obscenely expensive collectors' items. I'm glad I got mine before the gold rush began!
Wait a while, prices will probably go down I had an original original one that used a hard drive. Finally gave up the ghost. I guess it's all streaming now though that limits your choices to put together what you want to listen to as opposed to what's being steamed at the time. I am somewhat surprised that no one has made a clone. It did have competitors at the time.
I had a number of iPods over the years, none of them lasted as long as this one. The battery finally died as opposed to the hard drive itself, whereas I was more active with the previous ones and the hard drives would get corrupted after a while. I am also surprised that some sort of competitor hasn't emerged, even it were expensive and somewhat clunky I would think there would be enough music aficionados to make it still commercially viable today.
Ah, seems like a future Kickstarter Project. A group called "wearerewind" is attempting to bring back the cassette player in Bluetooth form. Google it. So why not a notanipod?
If Apple would be willing to license the design, I think somebody could make a tidy profit manufacturing a retro nostalgia iPod that looked just like the original but had more storage, a touch screen in addition to the wheel, wi-fi connectivity, etc. The problem from their likely perspective is it would provide an alternative to their streaming business.
also have several of the smaller versions. The midsize one didn't seem to last long for some reason or other.
Google iPod alternatives. I don't know how many are still around, either in business or used but quite a few come up.
I still use mine!
Was a very sad day when my 160G iPod classic broke. Now only carry around 30G of music on iPhone
Used to curate 8 hours of music when working my shift, so iPod classic was great with the large storage. But now due to changes at work I’m reduced to YouTube & Relisten & LMA
I once worked in a window factory warehouse that was about evenly split between white and black workers. So each day would be classic rock radio in the mornings and hip-hop/R&B radio in the afternoons.
Like many others I like to listen to concert recordings, especially on the date that it occurred. Today was January 9th. Thus today Bowie 1997-01-09 was spinning
You must be very organized, whenever I think to do that I forget until a day or two later.
What was formerly iTunes, now music app on Mac works for me for now. each am I just search for today’s date. But since someone was posting about ABB 1973-12-31 today, starting my shift with ABB then GD 1970-01-10
I hope there's a performance of In Memory of Elizabeth Reed somewhere in there.
I keep my uptempo workout music on my phone for when I run, and I could fit more than I do, but there's no way anything but a dedicated device could store every song I might want to hear at a given moment.