Death of an iPod

Greg, I'm gonna be the one to say it.

Your ipod is dying.

If you have a best Buy plan or that ilk, you're about 4 weeks from getting a brand new one. If you don't, well, apple is gonna offer you 10% off a new one!

make your peace with your friend. It wont last much longer.

Yep, no need to drag it out...

Yeah, sounds like it's time to get a new one, Greg. It'll be fine - they're shiny, come in fun colors, and don't make 543 of your favorite songs vaporize into the universe.

Oooh Nooooo......
I am so depressed right now I struggle trying to find the words to express what I am feeling.

I got a 16gb iPod Touch for my birthday in July. Actually I begged and harrassed my parents till they advanced me the money to buy it a week before my b-day.

I instantly fell in love. I began putting my music on it (I did not have much, what there was was stored on the hard drive of my Mom's macbook).

Most importantly though...I have been using it for videos.

You Tube videos, other videos, i tunes store videos, all sorts of things. I've slowly built a collection that can keep me occupied no matter my mood or setting. The other day I was at the bank and had to wait while my Dad did all this boring stuff. Usually I'd sit down on a chair, close my eyes, and try and meditate or think of things.... No longer! I had the entire movie ONG BAK 2 saved to my ipod (ripped it off youtube one day), and spent 10 minutes in the lobby of the bank watching Tony Jaa flip off elephants and break peoples arms.

Any time I was bored or in a certain mood for a particular kind of entertainment (Be it AliG, Bill Maher, or other things) I had hours of video on my iPod to draw from and keep myself from being unentertained.


To get all these videos, and then convert them to MP4 so my iPod would play them, it tooks countless hours. Countless hours using my moms computer and having her bug me to get off it all the while I said "just five more minutes till I'm done converting!" followed by "now I just need to sync!". Then combined with the time it took to search for all these specific videos from every corner of the web, and then delete them off my Mom's hard drive when all was said and done..... a large portion of the past few months of my life has been occupied with building my iPod video collection



That all changed this afternoon. I tried to play a song in the car today... and my ipod would not do it.

I tried to play videos, and only some would play.

I quickly entered into a state of total panic.

Now two hours later, I've resynced and tried to recover, and the result? EVERYTHING THAT WAS ON MY IPOD IS GONE

EVERYTHING


I do not know what to do.

Some of the videos I have on here may not even be online anymore due to copyright violations, and thats IF I would even know where to look to find them again


To top it all off, now my mom's crappy music is on my ipod and i can't get it off. My iPod is not letting me selectively add just the albums I want. I used to be able to drag and drop, say , "SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE THE ALBUM", and JUST that album. Now I cannot drag or drop, just sync her whole dumb music library.

What is going on? Why did this happen to me ? I feel so shattered I cannot even bring myself to start downloading,converting, and syncing again. Heck, in the past week I'd just uploaded like 6 more hours of videos that took FOREVER to download and convert

Kate, has your Ipod been connected to more than one computer? Because if you plug your Ipod into my pc, your songs and videos will be deleted and replaced with mine. An Ipod should only be interfaced with one computer and iTunes library.

Goddammit why am I responding...argh.

Kate, plug your iPod into the computer.
When iTunes pops up, click the icon for your iPod in the left column.
Over in the right pane of iTunes, you should now be looking at the summary screen for your iPod.
Now, you have a couple of options. You can either check the box that says "manually manage my music and videos" and then drag and drop whatever you want on and off the iPod, or you can try and click "Restore" and restore from your last backup. Be sure you're on the computer where you did all of your video conversions, hopefully your most recent sync will have backed up most of your stuff. If you restore, you may still need to toggle the "manually manage..." setting again if you still want to drag and drop.

Further complications: yesterday Apple released both new iPod/iPhone firmware and iTunes 9. I have no idea how that may effect your restore attempts.

Finally, don't talk about pirating copywritten material here. Many chud posters are working writers and filmmakers and don't particularly like to read about people being cavalier about stealing shit online. That's their livelihood you're messing with.

Just backing up what EK is saying. Very uncool to rip off copywritten stuff, even if it's just once or twice. It hurts people here who have worked very hard on that stuff, every single time.

I ended up just having to start over with my video collection. Oh well.

And yes, I was only using it with my mom's macbook.

Now for some reason I cannot just drag and drop individual videos to my ipod. Why? Now it wants me to add them to my itunes library and sync it, where as I used to be able to drag a single video over the ipod tab in intunes and put it on my ipod. And when I'd reconnect my Ipod, it would leave my videos alone and I could add more, even if the files for some of them were no longer on the computer hard drive it would keep em on the ipod.

Ah ok sorry, did not mean to hurt feelings. Just by way of explanation, I'm going to be buying multiple copies of the Ong Bak 2 dvd, I just got sick of waiting for the release. As soon as the DVD hits stateside, they'll have plenty of my money. I've purchased ONG BAK 1 four times so far (twice for me, twice as gifts)

Weird, my first generation Mini works fine... but only 4 gigs...blah

Good luck Greg!

I think he may have gotten over it by now, Nick.

Can anyone tell me how to drag and drop videos to my ipod without putting them in my itunes library first and syncing? i used to be able to but now cannot figure it out

EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out

What's the deal with firmware updates always fucking up iPods? On my first gen nano, every firmware update would completely crash the thing, losing everything on it. I updated the firmware on my 4th gen nano the other day and it seemed fine. I plug it into my computer today and it froze the nano (I had to do the reset trick) AND my laptop.

I really, really fucking hate Ipod's. I had a video Ipod that was given to me as a gift, 10 months later sound only comes out of one headphone, and apparently it will cost the price of a new video Ipod to fix the headphone jack.

I happen to have a nano as well, but now it won't recognize any cd's I put in, so there's no song titles, which is a big pain in the ass because I have to make a new playlist every time I want to import songs.

Soooo, anyone have any ideas/suggestions?



Sorry- that was part rant, part question.

Huh - weird. I don't know what to tell you. I just got the new Nano myself, and haven't had a problem with it (even though it's still pretty new).

The one thing it did that was weird was when I was charging it for the first time, it appeared to split my play lists up. For example, I have my main library, then "Lisa's Main List", "Holiday Music", etc. When it was synching up "Lisa's Main List", it showed that only some of the songs were going in - like about 2/3rds of them instead of that full playlist - for example, let's say it was a playlist of 750 songs. But as it was synching, it read, "Synching 324 out of 657 songs." Then when it finished, all the songs were on there, my complete playlist. I don't know what happened, it was fine once it finished, but I thought I was going to have a problem on my hands while it was charging.

Anybody here ever try to do a battery replacement?

I did, on a 3rd Generation 20GB. It was pretty easy, and it wasn't particularly expensive. I don't know what the procedure is like on newer iPods, though.

Mine's a 30GB 3rd Gen Video. Where'd you get the battery from, if you recall?

I think it was from this site: http://www.ipodjuice.com/

The battery was definitely superior, but at that point in the iPod's lifespan I think the machine itself was already on the way towards failure, so I only got maybe a year out of it before I eventually had to replace it altogether. It had nothing to do with the battery itself or the replacement, though.

I'm glad this thread was bumped because I have the same iPod Greg has (or had, by now) and, despite the fact that I've had relatively few problems with it *fingers crossed*, I am thinking about upgrading. My thing is that I've never backed up my music before (there's too much of it and I try to keep my laptop clean because of what I use it for), so if I get a new unit I'd definitely want to do that going forward. I'm assuming you guys mainly use external harddrives? Or do you simply keep everything on your main computer?

I've got two hard drives now, and I keep all my music backed up on my secondary file drive, as well as scanned artwork and other documents.

However, I do that NOW because my last big hard drive shit itself, and I lost everything. Fortunately, there's a few good programs (can't think of the name right now, but just google like "get mp3s off iPod") that will take all your mp3s off your iPod and painlessly copy them back onto your hard drive in case that happens.

Beyond that, you can do the long and arduous task of burning the files onto DVDs as backups.

I do the external HD thing too, but it's in desperate need of a backup. I might do that this weekend.

I've looked into that before but always got cold feet (I'm generally paranoid anyway, but when it comes to my iPod I'm fucking Mrs. Bates), but that might be the quickest and most painless way to do it.

What the fuck--I synced my iPod Touch Monday morning before I went to work. Didn't end up listening to it there, but I plugged into my car last night. I hit the button to play a podcast...and it tells me there are no audio tracks on the thing. When I got home, I synced it again, and once again, it told me there was nothing on it when I disconnected it. I had to run the whole iPod restore thing, then re-sync all my playlists, podcasts, etc., to get it all back on there. The only thing I can think of that changed was that I installed Vista SP2 this weekend. But would that wipe out my iPod? And iTunes kept saying that there was data on the iPod the whole time until I ran the restore.

Not an iPod, but my Sansa keeps eating itself at weird, totally unprompted moments. It'll play through a track then suddenly stop, the screen will dim completely, and it won't play/turn off, yet the fucking thing is STILL ON because when I move the selector dial, it lights up all blue and pretty. It was only $27, but dammit I don't want it to die!

Goddammit, it did it again. I copied a couple of movies to my iTouch last night, brought it into work today to listen to some podcasts, and it's fucking empty again. What the fuck? Do I need to call Apple?

EDIT: Just filed a report with Apple. They're supposed to call me this afternoon. Ergh.

Ok, my third Ipod in 4 years now is on the fritz (headphone jack), and I refuse to buy another one. Can anyone recommend another mp3 player that isn't too expensive?

I have had good luck with my Zune 120. I had to return it due to a few dead/stuck pixels, but other than that, it's great. The Zune Support team is excellent.

I know its from a while ago but regarding backing up your music. I'm such a freak, I have it on my Laptop, an external hard drive and in addition I have all of my MP3's backed up on DVDs just in case someone sets off an EMP or my apt gets struck my Tesla's ghost. So now if the unthinkable happens I'll just need to load 15-20 DVDs up rather than 1000 CDs.

... now I just need to get a safe for the DVDs... and a gun.