Look, I use computers all day every day. I've got a lot of music, it hangs out on plex, it hangs out on my phone. Those two things, they handle metadata gracefully within their zones.

Try to take that out? Oh boy.

Trying to load that on an iPod Classic because you're tired of your music listening being interrupted by notifications? Oh boy ^2.

I've got about 9.5k songs, some flac, some mp3 some who knows.

If any of you are planning on playing with an iPod here's some advice.

SKIP ITUNES ALL TOGETHER.

Only use it for restoring an iPod.

Don't let it touch your music.

Manually convert FLAC->ALAC with ffmpeg. Instruct ffmpeg to ignore any video/art streams. Rebuild your library structure to be mostly flat based on artist/album. Run MusicBrainz Picard to grab album art and save as a single "cover.jpeg" in each album directory, then use foobar2000 + foobop(ipod plugin).

You will see people suggest this, think "oh how bad can itunes be, let me try that first".

I'll tell you. BAD. Itunes album art discovery? worse than letting a stoned gerbal pick randomly via where their poop lands.

Don't waste your time. I haven't tried alts for Linux yet, but foobar2000, despite being ugly as all hell does the job perfectly.

  • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    iPod == good

    anything else apple == bad

    There wasn't really a decent portable music player that could compete without being an audiophile device, and even then, no device got the UI right IMO. The devices themselves were kneecapped by everything around it. There's no good way to navigate through thousands of pieces of hierarchical data on a small device but the scroll wheel was the least bad by far.

    Even if you found another device that could sorta compete, either their UI was awful or build quality suffered. A touch screen is alright but I want to put my phone down.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      no doubt there weren't better options at the time, but I was forced to use iTunes and I will never forgive Apple for that crime

      • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Figuring out foobar2000 was both an intense relief and inspiration for this post. ipod classics are like 30-40 bucks now, 30 bucks for a storage upgrade and a torrent client and you never have to worry about license conflicts again.

          • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            The 5th gen ipod classics are some of the easiest to mod. The storage upgrade is from a company called iflash. You can grab an sdcard adapter to replace the og HDD which also helps with battery life. There's another company called elite obsolete electronics that sells batteries, screens, and other parts and tools for getting in. so you can basically find the cheapest 5th gen classic, and buy all the parts to make it look and act new as long as it wasn't water damaged.

            Only thing to really consider is RAM in these, the ram mainly effects shuffle, and sets a max # of tracks that you can shuffle. 7th gen classics got up to 50k songs before shuffle crashes. 5th gens between 20k and 30k depending on storage. The ipod mini 2nd gen can also handle between 20-30k and can be upgraded comfortably up to 256Gb which is neat.

            • JamesConeZone [they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Hell yeah, this is absolutely my shit. Thanks for this, looking forward to the rabbit hole

              • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Intentional technology is longer lasting technology which is less ewaste and less brainworm. I'm all about it. Its crazy the deals you can find too.