I’m all about having devices that function independently, and do what they do well.. I’ve always preferred to have my own music library and keep that separate from my phone as a distraction reducing measure, so when I started having issues with my 5 year old Sony Walkman MP3 player back in August, I realized just how much I missed my iPod Classic. I combed eBay for a while and found a pretty good deal on a last generation 160gb version that was supposedly refurbished. I used it for a couple of months only to have the Hard Disk crap out on me.
I tried numerous recovery measures as I had no desire to try and pop this thing open – I’d had an 80gb 6th Gen iPod Classic for close to 10 years before needing to replace the click wheel, and demolishing the screen in the process (that’s where the Walkman came in). After hours of attempts, it’d sync about 1/2 my library, stop, and then say that there was no music on the device. I tried side loading RockBox on it, which saw the music, but had a few issues when booting. I found a device that allows you to swap out the Hard Disk for an SD Card, this can be found at http://www.iflash.xyz. It was a breeze to install, and the hardest part of the whole thing was getting into the iPod – as I said above, this wasn’t my first rodeo.
While I technically downgraded my storage as I didn’t order an SD Card and opted to use a spare 128gb that I had sitting around, the solid state memory is a massive upgrade as it’s far less power hungry, and has a much snappier response time. Now I can go back to just having music playing with no interruptions during the work day, and maybe even enjoy it a little more while I’m out for a run.
This project kind of goes hand in had with my new Thursday lunch time fun of hitting the record store with a $10 bill and seeing what gems I can find on CD.
Roving On 