I love coming back to the iPod. It’s great having almost all of my music on one device that only does one thing: playing music.
My listening habits are much better when I listen to downloaded music than when streaming. On streaming services I tend to listen to lots of lists and I end listening to the same songs for long periods of time. On my computer and the iPod I usually listen to full albums, in order. It’s a different experience. I listen to the songs as the artist intended when publishing the album.
It’s an iPod gen 7 with the the HD replaced by a 128gb microSD. The firmware is the holy rockbox.
My listening habits are much better when I listen to downloaded music than when streaming.
I find this too. If I listen on my iPods, I listen. If I have Apple Music playing, it’s just audio wallpaper. I break out The Good Headphones and choose something from a finite selection of music that I’ve curated, and I’ll sit there and enjoy it properly, without the temptation to scroll the internet while I’m doing it.
I can’t remember whether this was the default behavior, but on the original iPod Classic you could browse your albums sorted by artist, and within artist by year. It’s a small thing, but it made the iPod feel like it was designed by someone who really cares about music, for someone who really cares about music, and I haven’t seen that approach replicated anywhere else in the 15 years since that model came out.
Just as a point of comparison YouTube Music by default doesn’t show your own library, and even that by default is just a hodge-podge of anything music-adjacent you’ve watched on YouTube. :(
That’s why I miss foobar so much!! You could sort and soft through your library in so many ways. I used to go through everything year by year. I’m surprised there aren’t any good standalone apps that do something similar.
Oh man, I haven’t thought about my old iPods in forever. I need to go dig them out and give that a shot. Times certainly were simpler back then.
I miss my 4th gen click wheel. ;( I loved that thing. I hope the person that swiped it out of my car got the same enjoyment from it that I did.
So nostalgic for my first i-touch needlessly jailbroken with a few dozen pirated albums on repeat!
I lost my iPod classic some years ago 😢 I used to use the same rockbox theme as you, I miss it so much.
So much nostalgia. I think I still have mine around too, in that same case.
Missing rockbox’ since both my clips passed 4 years ago. Used them for almost 10 years in workouts. Recently resumed running and bought a fiio M5 hoping I’d be able to rockbox’ it, but unfortunately there is no effort on that direction. It’s a great sounding device, it’s a pity. Ingenic x1000 cpu, it truly shines in AQ
I love my iPods enormously, to the point that, while I have an Apple Music sub, most of my proper listening is done via one of these three little beauties.
I bought a FiiO M3K a couple months ago to have a Rockbox machine again, and I’m so happy. Rockbox is just such a great piece of software.
Only issue I’m having is that the SD card seems to slowly get corrupted after a while, upon which Rockbox doesn’t boot anymore until I copy it to the SD card afresh and repair the file system.
Not sure what’s causing that… Might be the SD card itself, I suppose. I should probably reformat it and try again, but it’s 512gb and copying all my music takes such a long time.
Wow that’s a lot of space!
I don’t know if it might be related but I also have problems with the rockbox disk mode. To copy files I load the stock firmware. I don’t know how your device works but maybe if you have an easy way of copying files directly into the SD without rockbox disk mode you can avoid the problem…
That’s what I’ve always done in fact, so I’m afraid that’s not it… The FiiO has an SD slot that’s very easy to reach, fortunately. I had an IPod Photo before, which I also modded to use an SD card, and getting to that was quite a hassle 😅 The card was also getting corrupted in that thing, plus the battery was not impressive.
(That was with the same SD card, in fact, which of course might actually be the issue. I formatted it since the transfer, but maybe it’s just inherently corrupted…)
Nice, I have a iPod, but I mostly use my Zune to listen to tunes. I used to have a iAudio X5L for DAP goodness, running Rockbox even. Could play flacs for days. Loved that thing… lost it in a move though :(
