I have a 120 gig iPod classic (I know, I know…) that has been acting up on me. It’s gradually been getting slower and slower. By that I mean the time between when I press a button and when it responds has been lengthening. It was fairly instantaneous when I got it, but lately it usually takes around five seconds to, say, pause it. Which is annoying as I listen to it primarily at work and need to be able to stop and pay attention to other people as quickly as possible.
But now it’s gotten worse. Now it’s stopped paying attention to my inputs completely. In the last few days, it’s started needed two or three or sometimes more pushes of a button to get it to respond. That’s not good. It’s almost like the delay has gotten so long that it’s timing out and the instructions are just getting lost somewhere. And it happens every time I hit a button, unless it’s already awake and active and listening to me. And it’s all the buttons.
From poking around, it seems like the thing to try would be restoring it to its factory defaults, but seeing as how that would completely wipe the thing, I’d like to see if:
Anyone else has had this problem and can tell me for sure whether this will fix it
There are any programs out there that will copy everything on the iPod to my hard drive and then put it all back on the way it was before after I do the restore.
If it helps, I wonder if this is being caused by the way I use it. I’m somewhat unconventional. Although I have the usual music and video collection, the vast majority of what I listen to is loaded onto the iPod, listened to once, and then deleted. I load and delete probably a gig or two of audio per week. I wonder if that’s, I don’t know, fragmenting the drive or something hand-wavy like that.
What do you mean by that? It’s what I have too. What should I know? I got it because the Touch basically has insufficient storage and the Iphone+contract has insufficient storage+way too expensive.
But after wiping it, you would get the option to unwipe it, wouldn’t you?
Just that the pro- and anti-iPod camps can get quite vehement around here, and that was my attempt to defuse the argument before it gets started. The fact is, I’ve had several non-iPod MP3 players before this one, and I liked most of them quite a bit better than the iPod, but, as I say, let’s save all that for another thread.
I don’t know - do you? I’ve never done it before, but the apple site made it sound like everything just gets deleted full stop.
Ah, well, that’s just it. I don’t keep all my stuff on my computer. As I said, I load it, listen to it once, and delete. On my laptop, once something’s loaded onto the iPod, there’s no need for me to keep it on my hard drive. I back it up to my external hard drive immediately. So I still have the files, but if I wanted to restore them to a cleaned iPod, I’d have to dig through thousands of files, figure out which ones I haven’t listened to yet, and copy them all back from the backup drive to the iPod. That’s exactly the kind of chore I’m trying to avoid.
The makers of iTunes seem to think that everyone would want their iPod and computer to have exactly the same media available at all times. This is an odd assumption from my point of view. I don’t even bother importing my stuff into iTunes, typically. I have it open so I can access the iPod, but then I just drag my files into the appropriate playlist and wait for them to copy. My computer’s iTunes never sees them - there’s no point, since they’ll be gone soon anyway.
If you’re constantly deleting things, then just stop replacing deleted files for a while. Then you’ll get down to the end and you can restore it without losing anything.
Smeghead, “restoring” the iPod to factory settings will indeed wipe it clean as the day you bought it. (But for the scratches.)
If you want to save yourself trouble and have the disk space to do so, there are ways to move the music files from the iPod backwards onto a computer into one folder. You have to download non-approved software, though. I don’t think these programs are illegal – you’re not stealing anything, you’re just making the iPod do something that it’s not stritcly speaking set up to do – but just the same I’m not going to provide the details. Poke around if you’re interested.
I agree that most people probably don’t want to have iTunes on their computer be an exact mirror of what’s on their iPod, and the Restore option should be a last resort, not the first solution to a problem. For most people, it’s a huge pain in the ass to reload the damn thing and reconstruct all their playlists.
ascenray, I have no idea what your comment means, can you expand?
Has your battery life also gotten very short? My first iPod had that kind of unresponsiveness when it’s battery was nearly dead. Of course, having the battery replaced also wipes it clean. (In fact, I think sometimes they just send you a new iPod. There’s something in the small print on the Apple site about how they can’t guarantee that your iPod will retain any engraving…)
If I am understanding Smeghead correctly, as soon as he finishes listening to something on his Ipod, he deletes it and replaces it with something else. So if he just stops replacing stuff for a while, he could get the stored content down to zero, so when he restores to factory settings, he doesn’t lose anything.
I didn’t interpret him as meaning he turns over 100% of the content frequently, but if he does then you’re correct. Which means that most of the 120 gigs are being used to store other stuff, which can be backed up pretty easily.
Is there any chance that the iPod’s disk space is full with undeleted “deleted” stuff? I don’t really know how that works.
Have you tried just doing a reboot? It doesn’t wipe anything - it just restarts it. Hold the middle button and the menu button until the screen goes blank.
It’s a pretty reasonable assumption since:
-An ipod can easily be lost or damaged, so it makes sense to keep a backup of everything on it.
-The amount of data needed to back it up is extremely cheap on a desktop PC - a 1TB hard drive can be had for well under $100 (which is 10 cents/GB).
In your case you should probably assume that your ipod is likely to fail completely in the near future.
You mean you drag the files to the appropriate playlist in iTunes? If so then the files are added to the iTunes library on your computer. Not that this does you any good if you subsequently delete the files from your hard drive.
Anyway, what you need right now is a utility to copy everything from your ipod to your hard drive. This page lists the most common choices, some of which are free. There is nothing even remotely illegal about this - Ichbin Dubist seems to have an odd conception of legality.
Right. The playlist I use for most of the stuff is about 2.5 days in length, and I listen to it in the order in which I download. So every week or so, I delete, say, 15 hours worth of the oldest stuff that I’ve listened two, and add another, say 20 hours or so to the end. It never gets down to zero. Not that it couldn’t - I could save everything on the computer until I listen to everything - but that would take a while. There are also a large number of other 1-time playlists that I don’t want to have to meddle with.
And before someone asks, yes, I actually delete the files from the library, not just from the playlist.
Not in a while. Could be worth a shot, I guess.
No. Well, not exactly. In the sidebar, I can see my iPod and all of its playlists. I drag the files into the appropriate iPod playlist, and they copy right over. So although it goes through iTunes, they never get copied into my computer’s iTunes library. If they did, I’d have run out of space a long time ago.
Anyway, the point is not that I might lose my data. It’s all backed up and safe. I’m looking for a way to “save” my current iPod configuration (files, playlists, etc) on the computer so that I can then just “restore” it after wiping the disk. I want something that does it all in one step so I don’t have to wade through all my backups and do it all file by file. It’s convenience, not necessity.
I’m also hoping to hear from someone that’s had the same problem so I know if this would even help…
So the songs exist someplace on your harddrive (or an external)? How about pointing iTunes at that harddrive, then copying the playlists from your ipod to itunes? I’m at my work computer and can’t check this to see if it works - but it might.
:eek: I tried this on the way home because it had finally frozen up completely. I couldn’t get it even to pause or power down, no longer how long I held the button. So I reset it, because I couldn’t think of anything else I could do in the car, and when it came back online, it worked like new!!! It was astounding! I hadn’t bothered trying it before because I guessed it wouldn’t do anything, but I spent the whole drive home gleefully watching it obey my slightest whim. I could turn the volume up and down - just like THAT! Menus, playlists, commands…all were literally at my fingertips! YAY! Even better, I know how to fix it if it happens again.
Just for the sake of completeness, yes, the songs exist, but they’re not organized at all, other than by file name. They’re not saved in playlists or anything. That’s why I’d have to dig through thousands of files and folders and figure out which ones I still need to listen to. But now it’s a moot point! Woo hoo!
You add songs to iTunes, load them onto your iPod, then delete them from iTunes and copy the songs to an external drive? Why don’t you just have iTunes keep its library on the external drive and keep the songs in iTunes?
Well, (A) that’s not what I do. I already explained how I only use iTunes as a conduit. I neither add files (they’re not songs, incidentally - they’re programs ranging from 15 minutes to two and a half hours per file) to iTunes nor delete them from iTunes. And (B) I’m an old-school kind of guy. It’s just easier to pick up the files directly and move them around rather than try to force iTunes to do it for me. Honestly, I never even open iTunes unless I’m maintaining the iPod. I never listen to anything on my laptop, ever. To me, it’s just the program I have to use to access the pod. That’s how I roll, baby.
There is a fairly easy and perfectly legal way to transfer all of your songs from the iPod to your computer hard drive (if you have the room) without needing any extra software.
Assuming you’re running Windows (big assumption, I know)… With your iPod plugged in, click Start and then Search.
Under search options, click on Advanced Options and direct it to search your iPod, which will be listed under a drive, like :E, w/ your iPod name.
Then go under “More Advanced Options” and check the box for “Search Hidden Files.”
Click Search and it’ll bring up everything you’ve got on there. If you want to narrow it down to just MP3s, you can type *M in the “All or part of file name” box to do this.
Now, just do a Select All, Copy, and then paste it into a folder on your hard drive. It’ll transfer it all. You won’t be able to tell which file is which, since they’re all given random four letter names (is ZFEJ) but if you then drag all of the files into iTunes, it should fill in all the titles and names just fine.
Once you point iTunes at the folder, iTunes does all the organizing for you. (Assuming the file contains title/artist/album info.) You then copy a playlist over from your ipod, which would (hopefully) fill those playlists with the songs that already exist.