Say Goodbye to the iPod Classic

Used for parts for servicing?

 

Not if Apple bought a goddamned flash memory corporation and dropped prices! A 120GB USB thumb drive is well under $50 these days. Why should the same memory be a huge expense in a $400 iPod?

 

Most likely used for warranty parts.

 

That would be a crapload of parts, more than it seems would be necessary.

 

If a defective unit (under Warranty) is returned, they will just replace it with a new one - they'll trash the defective one, no matter how minor the issue. If they still have excess inventory, they will sell them online through their own store.

 

All the music is on the hard drive, yes, but there is no back up of the playlist. Essentially, the music is not lost, but I have to put everything back on it again which is a huge pain.

 

I have a pretty high-volume plan, so I'm not seeing any additional charges.

 

Wherever they went , you wont be able to get to them. Apple are pretty about ruthless pulling and sequestering discontinued product (and any cases etc.) the moment their replacement or an end of life is announced. I can almost guarantee you could not have walked into any apple store last Monday and bought a classic after 11:30, or whenever the speeches ended and the website updated , even if there were 50 of them in the back room. I have had this experience myself when they changed the nano form factor and pulled all the old ones, and all the 3rd party cases, the minute the new one was announced.

 

I expect Apple to take all of the returned Classics and run over them with a steamroller as lunch time entertainment at their campus. Or maybe do some will it blend demonstrations in the coffee break rooms for those trapped in their cubicles during the steamroller roll-a-thon.

 

Learn from your lesson: always have a backup of both the music files and the iTunes playlist (.itl and .xml files). This problem only gets worse as your collection gets larger.

 

They sent them all to Steven Wilson and his torchlight.

 

I learned about the library files the hard way, since I have extensive playlists that are often dependent on play counts. iTunes Match steamrolled the library data once when updating and since then I've backed up the two files with SuperDuper.

 

Mine might be a much simpler usage - I only have a couple of playlists - Workout, Holday (December), Summer and maybe one or two more. I put the playlist name in the Comments field. This makes recreating playlists on my laptop or desktop a snap. Slightly off topic - I embed the artwork in every track too.

 

iTunes is an evil program. As I think I said earlier in this thread (or in a similar thread on iTunes), I keep multiple external drives with the actual iTunes library files on them, so the whole drive gets backed up in one swell foop. Apple has greatly improved iTunes' ability to know when a specific library is on an external drive.

I think that can work, but backing up the ITL files is actually pretty easy. You can also export a playlist file as a text file, so that's another way of backing it up. I use the Comments field for other things.

What is maddening is that there are about 300 different ID3 Tags available, but Apple only uses a couple of dozen of them and they still limit the comments field to 255 characters. Other programs allow several thousand characters with no problem. There's lots of weird little frustrations with iTunes like that.

 

i found the ipod classic to be robust enough to take to the gym for a workout. what is apple going to replace it with that is similarly robust? are they coming out with an 128GB ipod touch next year? is a touch less robust than a classic?

 

But what does Apple do with them? Why not let consumers buy them?

 

I guess you have never had yours fall to the ground while running - a gut wrenching feeling immediately sets in. The most obvious concern is the thud to the hard drive, but headphone jack, clickwheel and display are vulnerable - even in a case.

 

#1 "MP3 Player" seller on Amazon: 160 GB iPod Classic.

 

Don't go running with a Classic. Mine crapped out before a year was out. I got a replacement under warranty however. Never ran with the new one and its been good as gold for 7 years.

I saw the 160G in an electronics store today, so not all shops have pulled them. I don't think I'll bother buying though as I'm saving for a new ipad mini. Even with 80G, it takes months to get around to listening to everything. 32G would probably do me.

 

I was able to score a new Classic from B&H last week at regular price, before everybody sold out and Amazon jacked the price up by $100. Waiting for UPS to arrive with it as I type this. Anybody know if a silicone case for a 5th gen. iPod video will fit a 7th gen. iPod Classic? If not, then the search begins for a case for a discontinued item...

 

In the past, whenever a new iPhone model has come out, has a "corresponding" iPod Touch come out at the same time?

 

It's a shame.

 

Wow, that is bad.

I've been reading this thread with some interest as I've inherited 4 iPods over the years and the only one that has given me problems is the 120 gig classic (needs to be restored about every month or two - battery life is just fine). I'm not going to replace it but will consider a Pono.

 

You seem to know more about this kind of thing than I do, never mind the fact that I've used an iPod for years and years.

I have an extremely large collection and I keep the ripped files of my music on a 2tb hard drive (which has a back up to it). I do not have anything on my computer hard drive at all. What I do move from my external drive to my hard drive, I erase when I'm finished with it. How do I create an iTunes "playlist" (I'm not even sure what that is, frankly, as I listen to most full albums on my iPod) that will back up to my computer hard drive without completely overloading it? I think my iMac is 500gb.

I'm not sure I even adequately made myself clear, but if you can cut through the confusion of this post and give me an answer, I'd really appreciate it. I feel like I'm missing something relatively obvious here ...

 

A "playlist" is kind of a strange concept to understand the first time you hear about it.

Originally, my mental model was that a "playlist" is like a "mix tape" of years gone by.

But it's really more that that.

It's a set of tracks...

The set can be small (with only 1 member in it) or it can be very large (with thousands of members in it).

I tend to not populate playlists "by hand".

There is an option (along the top tabs) that says "create playlist".

I tend to use "smart" playlists... I think that's a separate option "create smart playlist".

An example of one I created is a playlist of everything I own where the composer is Bob Dylan.

That one finds a lot of recordings not made by Bob Dylan (The Byrds, Judy Collins, Greg Trooper, The Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, etc.). But there is a way to also include other factors into the smart playlist.

Like my "Dylan" playlist says "add anything where composer is 'Dylan'" OR "add anything where "artist" is "Dylan" (because he doesn't write everything he sings). Then I have another rule that says "and exclude artist = "Wallflowers" - because I don't want his son (Jakob Dylan) in this playlist.

Getting a smart playlist to do exactly do what you want is a little bit of trial and error.

Most of my playlists are based on "year" = (year of my choice).

It's possible for a song to exist in more than one playlist - which I think is the confusing thing to grasp for a newbie. Other confusing thing is that a playlist retains "album" constructs... So it's not like my Dylan stuff just gets randomly scattered in a playlist. All of the albums in my Dylan playlist can still be played as album.. A playlist is just a way to look (or play) at a set of songs... it's a way to mentally group things so they stay together.

I also have a smart playlist called "never played" that is defined by "playcount=0". That's an interesting list because it eats itself (play a song and the song is dropped from the list).

Right now, for example, I have about 270 songs in my "never played" smart playlist. That means I have about 270 songs I have purchased that I haven't listened to yet. I was all proud I had the number getting in low 100s then I went to Half Price Books the other day and came home with about 15 compact discs and my list size doubled. LOL

In my Itunes library, I have three smart playlists called "blue Ipod" "black Ipod" and "White Ipod"

The black Ipod has songs with years prior to 1968... the blue Ipod had songs with years that range from 1964 to 1977... the white Ipod is everything from 1978 forward to the present day.

There are some exceptions to these rules - but that's basically my strategy for filling a classic... keep the years of recording near each other...

All that really matters is the dates are accurate (or at least what I want them to be... I prefer a 1971 recording that was released in 2012 to have a 1971 date)


There is a way to save a playlist as a separate file. I've done it to take that list and apply it to a different library on a different computer. Porting that list has some problems - but those don't eliminate the essentially good practice of saving them as separate things to save.