The rundown

ever since the iPod classic came out 15? 20? years ago, I was in love with them. Being able to carry around your entire music library on a nifty device with a sleek user interface was amazing. Of course, with the rise of the smartphone, iPods were slowly becoming obsolete. I kept mine around for a while though, as phones with enough (80gb+) storage for my whole music collection were too expensive.

When I did get my first iPhone with enough storage, I happily shelved the iPod classic in lieu of the convenience of just having to lug one device around. However, if my phone ran out of battery, there would be no way to listen to music. Where my iPod had a week’s worth of juice, my iPhone hardly made to the end of the day. Also, a phone is a distraction machine - it pings and rings, vying for your attention. Searching for the next album often sucked me into the notification vortex.

When my phone’s planned obsolescence kicked in (or I dropped it, I cant remember), the shiny new model didn’t even bother adding a headphone jack. I had never cared much for Bluetooth, so I bit the bullet, purchased my first “dongle” and lived with it.

the next milestone was when I downloaded Spotify. The possibility of listening to anything, anywhere was enticing. In practice though, I didn’t meticulously reproduce my music library in the app, and instead hopped from one album or playlist to another, often letting the algorithm choose my music for me.

When streaming became popular, I stopped playing my stored songs entirely. I put away my iPod and forgot about it. Spotify was so convenient Why would I ever go back to what was before?

The brick wall

When the first few albums I loved were not available in spotify, I shrugged. I would just stream them from youtube. after a while, I just stopped listening to them alltogether. I went to spotify, plopped on a playlist, and forgot about it. I didn’t “explore” music as much as stuff was just thrown on my lap and I could decide if I liked it or not. listening to music felt a little bit less personal, even while the playlists were becoming more tailored to my life. Each music session a segmented slot in an arranged calendar of my life. “study music”. “Tuesday after-coffee afternoon crash productivity mix”. “running tunes”. “lazy Sunday instrumental beats”, “piano for concentration”. the song arrangements felt stale, mechanical, even when a few bangers from the past would emerge out of the algorithmic swamp. I stopped listening to music, it just became a drip feed designed to fill the void of silence. I wasn’t enjoying an album, I was consuming tracks. arrangements of songs served the purpose of making me calmer, more productive, or loosen up, give my kitchen the correct ambience for cooking, make me seem cultured and worldly as a dinner-party host. It felt performative and boring. I didn’t search for music, I just waited for the autosuggestions to kick in, grunting as I clicked the sickly green heart in the hopes of appeasing the algo.

I also missed being able to keep my own music (that I made) next to “real” artists. I had bought some CDs off of street musicians in the past, and I liked having them in my library. I missed my albums that were not commerically viable for spotify to provide to me. goodbye early 90’s jungle records, Joni Mitchell, adieu Tool, King Crimson. The effort of side-loading a bunch of albums is too large for me to care about the stragglers I’d lose by the wayside in the pursuit of immaculate convenience.

But I noticed how my relationship to music was changing. I felt less inclined to sit down and listen to albums. for lack of want, I would just hover around in playlists, half human half machine. I would often get stuck in “song loops”, where the same 5 songs would constantly be played next. I felt uninspired by music.

I still had my massive music colleciton from when I was a teenager. total bangers like the 200 songs under the artist name “1!!!SDRUMANDBASSMIX!!!1” ripped from 140p youtube videos, the ominous artist “mixed music”, which hid IDM and dubstep classics, all the CDs I ripped from my dad, it felt like meeting an old friend. I wanted them back in my life, all those strange tunes I felt so much for. Like a garden planted decades ago, I was savouring a spot in the shade of a tree where once a sapling lay. The songs themselves remained unchanged in their crappy quality, awful filename tagging, inconsistent formatting, but it felt unique, this colleciton of records and snippets existed nowhere else. It’s a wonder I never lost these 100GiB of nostalgia along the way.

Enter the iPod video

Lo an behold, the receptacle of this digital archive was mostly accessed through the spinwheels and clicks of the iPod Classic. I wanted that experience again - so I dug the old friend of it’s dusty shelter and plugged it in. It still… worked? it was excruciatingly slow and the battery lasted about as long piece of toast might stay warm.

I looked into the surprisingly thriving communities of iPod restoration. storage technology had advanced so quickly that one could gut the powerhungry and slow Toshiba HDDs inside the iPod, and replace them with a custom SD card reader instead. Weight, battery usage go down, storage space goes up. No firmware updates necessary, it is literally plug and play (once you have figured out how to open the iPod without breaking it).

I was so intrigued, I started collecting them. Consensus is that the 5th gen 80GB classics are the most sought after. Something about a superior Digital Analog Converter, how much RAM the devices have, and how much cloud you’ll have when you pull the thing out at your local nerd convention.

Above you see the 3 iPods (5th gen, rev 1), as well as a 6th gen. the chip is the “iFlashSolo” chipset which allows you to replace the HDD with the SD card. As you gain a lot of space inside the enclosure, suddenly your old iPod becomes an iconic and surprisingly hackable little device. dip your toe into the world of iPod refurbishment, you’ll find all sorts of wacky projects that people have come up with.

and finally, Bluetooth

I opted to use the space on my iPod to add bluetooth compatibility. like all things in the 21st century, the appearance counts. From the outside, nothing indicates that the iPod has been hacked together with a bluetooth chip. However, in addition to plugging in your buds into the headphone jack, you could press down on the “hold” button for the iPod to connect to your AirPods. it was far from perfect, but it was really fun. it involved soldering the lead cables of the bluetooth device to audio jack, as well as connecting it to the main power supply on the iPod chip. Here is what this frankensteinian creation looks like on this inside. notice the additional battery, the ungodly amount of load-bearing solder and the general messiness of it.

And the button configuration involved using a clicky button from an arduino set, a hot glue gun and a lot of patience.

But it works! I will be posting a how-to when I get round to it. Now I rock an old iPod, and I have been using it for a while now. It feels a bit gimmicky but it is surprisingly useful.