Say Goodbye to the iPod Classic

Backing up a "playlist" is not like backing up the music IN the playlist.

Think of the playlist as a list of song titles. It's a relatively small thing that doesn't consume a lot of hard drive space.


When someone says "backup your playlists" in addition to "back up your music" they are talking to people who have large playlists with a lot of song titles added by hand.

If you don't have many lists - or your smart rules are pretty simple... there isn't as much to lose.

 

So let me get this straight....even if I wanted to start using an MP3 player, I have to use an iTouch now? Or a smartphone? No thanks.

 

Only if you're limiting your choices to Apple.

 

Well, here's the steps I do to start an iTunes Library:

1) format a new external drive
2) rip a whole bunch of CDs to the drive (usually in 320kbps AAC); I keep Lossless copies elsewhere
3) arrange the folders under whatever system makes sense to you -- by artist name, album title, music type, whatever
4) launch iTunes
5) in Prefs, under the Advanced tab, set the iTunes Media Folder location as the external drive
6) turn off "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" & turn off "copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to library"
7) import all the music
7) create playlists & arrange songs in the correct order.

Exit iTunes, then locate the iTunes Library folder, which is usually (but not always) on your boot drive. Drag that over to the external drive. This folder should include files called iTunes Library, iTunes Library.ITL, and iTunes Library.XML, plus many others that are less important.

Now launch iTunes but hold the shift button down (option button on the Mac). You will see a pop up that says "Choose iTunes Library":

Using the "Choose Library" button, find the external drive and the new folder you just created. Highlight that and hit OK. Now, you're running a library entirely on an external drive. When you finish, copy the entire drive over to another drive -- preferably two.

There are tons of tutorials about this on the iLounge, but be warned that some of them are dated so menus have been moved, control panels shifted, options have changed, and so on:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/tutorials

 

There's always the Nano. I like the Nano for certain things, particularly working out at the gym where I don't want anything more than 1 ounce in my pocket. I wish they'd come out with a 32GB or -- dare I say it? -- a 64GB Nano, but we got what we got. Bear in mind there are 128GB thumbdrives out there that are only $50. Both the iPod Classic and the iPhone are five or six times heavier and tend to flop around in awkward positions. (Never good when that happens at the gym.)

It's possible they want to bulldoze them all as a tax write-off. I know of a case where a major video manufacturer deliberately destroyed about $10 million worth of unsold discontinued gear for the tax break, back in the 1980s.

 

This is exactly what I've done for years! I have it backed up on a couple of external hard drives and my iPod/iTunes library runs entirely off of it.

 

What I find most disheartening about the retirement of the classic - is that Apple pretty much knows EXACTLY how many classics are up and running - because that thing called Itunes doesn't exist on an island - and it can tell them lots of facts about our devices.

I suspect they know that there are still a fair number of users who have them and use them daily. I also suspect that they are somewhat disappointed that they don't break often enough. I know they can't last forever - but I haven't had a hiccup since I got my first one in 2010 - and I've bought others when I fill one up.

Maybe they've formed an opinion that classic users are "bad" customers because we rip a lot of CDs - and don't mindlessly buy and buy and buy from the Itunes store.

But that doesn't really make sense either - because I tend to buy a fair amount from the Itunes store... it's just not my primary retailer. Mostly because I tend to buy things on a physical format that they don't even sell.

 

I don't see the point in buying extra iPod Classic players for the future. Portable spinning hard drives, especially less than 500 gigs, are on their way out fast. Solid state players that hold more than the Classic are nearly here now (See the Sony player above) and will continue to get cheaper in future years.

 

Ease of use and available features are two good reasons for doing it. I haven't checked the Sony, but my bet is it wont support shuffle by album

 

I tried making my external drive a NAS which is defined as a "volume" on an Imac.

It doesn't work as well as I had hoped - because the Imac occasionally forgets that my libary is not at the folder I told it - and goes back (without me realizing it) and tries to make my libary at some default folder on the Imac drive.

I think the issue is I share an Imac with my son - and he constantly logs off of my account - and when I get back on - it has already decided that the folder was "gone" and taken "corrective" action.

I don't understand what's so darn hard about staying stuck on a folder of my choice - but somehow I'm not fitting their paradigm.

The problem shows up when I go to add new CDs - and I realize they aren't going on to my external drive.

I've gotten pretty compulsive about CHECKING if the Imac is talking to my external drive BEFORE I rip... which generally keeps things aimed at where I want them... but it's a hassle.

 

The thing that basically keeps me away from competing MP3 products is integration with car headunits.

It's somewhat of a miracle that almost every car on the planet comes with a way to talk to an Ipod - and Apple is bound and determined to lose that advantage... I fully expect to be completely annoyed when the only car head units one can find are only able to talk to devices that use a lightning cable. I already described my mini drama now of trying to find a headunit that can support three types of cables (32 pin Ipod connector, Lightning, and microUSB).

As for the Sony... if it can send artwork to my Pioneer in my car - I would investigate it.


Lightning is just a MAJOR annoyance by the company who once made inspired products.

 

Storage capacity on all i-devices is going up, not down. If Apple were trying to get people to buy from the iTunes store and not rip their own CDs, they would be removing capacity, not increasing it.

 

This problem can be solved by making sure the external drive is connected and powered on before iTunes is launched. If you launch iTunes and the folder you set in the preferences in unavailable, it reverts to the default location. If you quit iTunes and connect the external drive, the next time iTunes is launched it will return to the location you set.

 

Not offering a device with storage that is equivalent in price (or less) per gigaByte is what they just did.

It's counter to the trend that they followed during the early evolution of the product (keep coming out with devices with more and more storage PER device).

At some point, some marketing genius decided that their were pesky Apple consumers who don't spend enough money (per year) on Apple products to be considered legitimate. Classic users seem to be in that category.

 

I've had that problem before. One thing that helped was always make sure the external hard drive is plugged in and running before you open iTunes. I've had it switched back because I opened iTunes while forgetting to plug in the hard drive. I too use an iMac.

 

The external drive is NEVER turned off.

I think the difference is my 'external drive' is a NAS device.

The NAS device never goes down - or rarely goes down. The Imac just forgets that it's there - PROBABLY - because my Itunes application is closed when my son - logs off and logs back on as him (where it points to a different library that he maintains).

I've tried talking to Apple tech support about it and they thought I was going to "burn out" my NAS by using it.

I never understood that comment. It's basically a computer that sits there waiting to be used. How much it gets used, or how I wear it out - is kind of my business. It has two discs - and if one of them breaks, I get an email telling me to replace the broken one.

I haven't gotten one of those "replace hard drive" emails in two years. And the lights on it are still green (so it's not that my emails from my NAS are broken).

I deal with the problem... but it's a recurring theme with Apple. I tend to deal with more than one problem with them. For example, it would be REALLY nice if I have two machines running Itunes that use "apple sharing" if I could trust that when I tell one machine to tell me what the other machine doesn't have on it (so I could copy) that it would actually FIND all the things missing on one machine. It clearly has bugs. Songs with similar titles - fall off the face of the earth. I noticed the libraries weren't in complete sync when the track counts started to be different. I spent three months one time manually checking folders on two computers to MAKE them identical.

I should have just used Vidiots strategy - seems simpler in retrospect.

 

Hard drives are technology from the last century. Because they are mechanical, you are going to have a higher failure rate in manufacturing, and a higher warranty return rate once they are sold. I have no idea what the actual sales numbers are, but sales on the iPod Classic have undoubtedly been dropping for years. Eventually it is no longer cost-effective to keep manufacturing and servicing the device.

They tend to double the maximum capacity of i-devices every 2-3 years, so I'd expect to see a 256GB iPad in 2015 and the same capacity in an iPhone or iPod Touch in 2016-2017.

 

I just looked at Sony's web site. It has 64GB and can take up to 128GB card. Bigger than the classic by not by a lot. It also just mentions shuffle which usually means songs. The fact that it mentions shuffle at all is better than most web sites. I personally couldn't care less about the high rez. I listen to AAC and MP3 on my portable, so I'll be paying a lot for features I don't use. For just a little more money, I can mod a classic and have 256GB.

 

In my case, I have to "test" whether the NAS is visible - by going to a folder on it - and seeing if I can see files on the external machine. If I can see them - same as you said - "drive" is "plugged in".

Forget to do that... chaos reigns.

The basic problem is that Itunes shouldn't be so damned intent on going back to a default folder. If it can't see my drive - TELL me. Don't go off on some damn fool crusade - using a folder I thought it wasn't supposed to use.

 

I use a wireless Synology server to store most of my iTunes library. Since it's not physically connected and resides on the network, when I log out or restart the iMac the server is also disconnected until I manually mount it again. The solution to this issue is to go into your user settings and add the drive to the "launch at startup" menu. All you have to do then is make sure you want about 30 seconds after a restart to launch iTunes.

 

I hate when that happens . I have a Drobo NAS. I haven't copied my library directory to it, but it's where my music goes. When I wake my Mac Mini up to import tracks, it takes 30 seconds or so for the Mac to reconnect to the NAS. If I start importing before then, it puts them in the default music directory. I've gotten in the habit of clicking on the mounted NAS drive before doing imports.

I never shut down iTunes. I have no idea what would happen if I tried using iTunes with library files on the NAS and the NAS not remounted.

 

I agree. Nothing worse than finding out songs are missing and having to go through and find out how many of them are, which ones are, and replace them or transfer them back to the hard drive.

 

And my suggestion is that the sales have been dropping because the supposedly inferior classics are TOO reliable.

The guy in the store told me the other day. The nice devices that don't have the evil mechanical memory - break OFTEN - because the screens often break. Meanwhile - the same guy tells me he started using an Ipod classic that was thrown "100 yards" from a vehicle into a field - AND - it works just fine.


My point is that I understand Apple is angry that it doesn't sell enough of them...

But is that because no one uses the classic product ? Or is it because they have a lot of people happy with the ones they bought ?

Apple KNOWs the answer to that question.

It's not hard to figure out how many 7 year old Ipod classics are still running just fine because those who are using them are still using Itunes.

Apple is eliminating the classic in an effort to make more MONEY... I get that. They do have stockholders.

But the reality is I was a happy classic user, and I bought a lot of OTHER things that I wouldn't have (like an Imac, three AppleTVs, Ipods for gifts to others, etc). And those purchases are now going to stop (for me), for a variety of reasons. One of them being the evil lightning connector (which is a separate blunder prior to this one).

I'm NOT trying to cut off my nose to spite my face... Apple just keeps breaking the "ecosystem" that they developed (and were once proud of)...

Steve Jobs had a quiet confidence that people would participate in the ecosystem - because it OFFERED them something - not because they were FORCED to.

The new people running Apple don't have a clue what made their products great.

 

It would depend on what you're trying to do.

If you try to play a track that is on the NAS, you'll get an error that the file can't be found. The easy solution to this is to shut down iTunes, mount the NAS, and then start iTunes up again.
If you import tracks from a CD and the NAS is unavailable, it will put the files in the original iTunes default folder on your local drive. The easy solution to this is to shut down iTunes, mount the NAS, and start iTunes up again (it doesn't hurt to also verify that iTunes is recognizing the NAS as the default location again). There is a "consolidate library" option in one of the menus that will then copy all of the files on your local drive to your NAS. You can then delete them from the local drive.

 

It's being discontinued because 1) mechanical drives are becoming obsolete, 2) because your classic from 2005 still works, you haven't bought one since 2005, and 3) since you're not buying one, and most people outside of this board either have an iPhone or would prefer a touch to a classic because of internet connectivity, apps, etc. It doesn't make sense to continue making a device that is sort of outdated, and hasn't sold well in many years compared to their other products. You did notice that they waited until the 128gb solid state drives were available until they pulled the plug at least. Yes, 128gb is less than 160gb, but not by a whole lot. It's better than the previous alternative of 64gb. Also, who's to say they aren't updated the touch line to include a 256gb drive? I personally doubt it, but you never know. I like my 5th generation model from 2005. I had a classic with a 160gb drive, and I liked it too. But guess what? The drive failed after about four years. Click click click... They are mechanical and break. Solid state won't have that problem. And like I said before, most people would like the option of internet, apps, etc. on their device.