My alternative to CD's

Bugetnirvana

Active Member
I have a couple old Gen 4 Ipods. I learned that parts are available on Flea-bay for some excellent upgrades, and the instructions to install them are on the other video site. So I spend an average of $10,00 to $15.00 for an Ipod with issues, bad hard drive, bad battery or?? Then get a compact flash adapter for about $2.00, an extended life battery for about $10.00. Put it all together and Voila, you have a wallet sized digital music source that lasts for hours and hours and sounds surprisingly excellent. My current CD library is roughly 1900 songs and I have two of these upgraded Ipods with 34 GB CF cards and they arent even half full yet. The CF card upgrade is terrific. It removes the fragile shock risk, is lighter, reads faster and takes less battery life. All of my CD's are boxed up and placed in storage for safe keeping as opposed to getting scratched up and cluttering up my living room. My CD player is now in my storage room as well. And my entire music collection goes with me everywhere I go. It is a neat alternative that I highly recommend.
 
Thanks, I have an old 160G with a broken HD and in need of a battery. I might have to give this a try.

Oh, and welcome to AudioKarma.
 
Thanks, I have an old 160G with a broken HD and in need of a battery. I might have to give this a try.

Oh, and welcome to AudioKarma.
Thanks for the welcome. A 160 GB would suggest a later Gen Ipod. Im not sure if that adapter would work for them or if they have such alternatives available. I tried it on a 3rd Gen and even they are different.
 
I gave up on iPods.....2hich is sad because I held on for A LONG time.

Mine ultimately had a failing screen...got left in the car two vacations ago and the high desert sun cooked it. Nice grey pixels all over. But it was a 30gig...when I tallied up what it would cost to fix and uograde...it was cheaper to find another solution.

I ultimately decided to just switch to using my phone with a 200gb microSD card. I transcoded all my general lossy to Opus....audiophile releases to higher bitrate Opus...and all my lossy I copied over as is. I run Foobar2000 on the thing. I've never been happier.

I won't mention the three weeks I spent sorting tags and such.

It's different at home. Everything is stored on both local storage and a NAS (with a third backup copy on an external drive). I play right off my PC through a DAC.

I haven't used physical disc playback for digital in close to 20 years.
 
Thanks, I have an old 160G with a broken HD and in need of a battery. I might have to give this a try.
Thanks for the welcome. A 160 GB would suggest a later Gen Ipod. Im not sure if that adapter would work for them or if they have such alternatives available. I tried it on a 3rd Gen and even they are different.
I have a 160GB iPod with a failing hard drive, so looked into this a little. IIRC the issue with these kind of upgrades is that there’s a maximum usable drive size because of what the firmware expects. I think with the last Classic that you can go up to 256GB. I also think that SSD may be an option, but I may be misremembering that part. I ended up giving it a pass and buying a FLAC player instead, which means I never have to use iTunes again.
:banana:
I hate wasting stuff, though, so at some point when I’m bored maybe I’ll get a drive and a battery and then flash it with Rockbox or something and keep it as a backup.
 
But can those iPods also serve as beer mats?

Greetings from Munich (& scnr... ;))!

Manfred / lini
 
I have a couple old Gen 4 Ipods. I learned that parts are available on Flea-bay for some excellent upgrades, and the instructions to install them are on the other video site. So I spend an average of $10,00 to $15.00 for an Ipod with issues, bad hard drive, bad battery or?? Then get a compact flash adapter for about $2.00, an extended life battery for about $10.00. Put it all together and Voila, you have a wallet sized digital music source that lasts for hours and hours and sounds surprisingly excellent. My current CD library is roughly 1900 songs and I have two of these upgraded Ipods with 34 GB CF cards and they arent even half full yet. The CF card upgrade is terrific. It removes the fragile shock risk, is lighter, reads faster and takes less battery life. All of my CD's are boxed up and placed in storage for safe keeping as opposed to getting scratched up and cluttering up my living room. My CD player is now in my storage room as well. And my entire music collection goes with me everywhere I go. It is a neat alternative that I highly recommend.


This sounds interesting to me, but I am not particularly astute on the technology

Just to be clear...you are opening up the iPod, pulling out the old hard drive, and replacing it with the CF adapter plus a CF card?

On a related note...several years back I replaced the battery on a 40GB 4th gen iPod. The battery was fairly expensive, and lasted for about a year. Perhaps I just got a dud, but given the difficulty of getting into the unit, I've never been interested in trying it again.

However, your post has piqued my curiosity. I remember paying quite a bit more than $10 for the battery...where did you get the extended life battery you mentioned?
 
This sounds interesting to me, but I am not particularly astute on the technology

Just to be clear...you are opening up the iPod, pulling out the old hard drive, and replacing it with the CF adapter plus a CF card?

On a related note...several years back I replaced the battery on a 40GB 4th gen iPod. The battery was fairly expensive, and lasted for about a year. Perhaps I just got a dud, but given the difficulty of getting into the unit, I've never been interested in trying it again.

However, your post has piqued my curiosity. I remember paying quite a bit more than $10 for the battery...where did you get the extended life battery you mentioned?

Yes, I remove and replace HD and battery. I think the factory batteries were 750 Mah. There are stronger ones available now. This one is 1300 Mah. https://www.ebay.com/itm/EXTENDED-B...h=item1c57356da4:g:mv8AAOSwgQ9VwTeS:rk:6:pf:0 And there are these. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Battery-fo...9:g:KSsAAOSwrWVbJB5D:rk:1:pf:1&frcectupt=true

There are also some 1200 Mah batteries. Once you get a feel for how it is done it is really quite easy. Also, I found out the hard way that if you dont use some sort of insulation between the adapter and Ipod circuitry the adapter can short out. I just used a piece of cardboard and a little silicone sealer on mine.
 
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I don't get it. Why drag an outdated clunky old iPod around with you? Just copy the files to your phone, or use a streaming app.

Do you really want to copy thousands of songs to your phone and use it as your primary music source? Even at home? I dont. I drive trucks so I listen to mine a LOT! Like others here I too despise Itunes, but the sound quality from these old Ipods is very good! How are the DAC's in your phone?
 
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Can't speak for the OP, but in my case we use iPods as media players in our GM cars. We leave them in the cars and plugged in, which I find to be more convenient than using my phone as a music player. GM has pretty slick integration with Apple devices, and while I now use Foobar at home as my media player, I still maintain my digital music (99% of which is ripped from CD, in lossless form) in iTunes. For the iPods, we download from iTunes as AAC files...sound quality is good, and allows a 32GB iPod to hold a good portion of my digital music collection...and all of the hundreds of extended-play playlists that I've built over the years.

Streaming, as it moves to better and better quality, may be the thing that converts me to using my phone as my drive-time music source...but not yet.
 
Do you really want to copy thousands of songs to your phone and use it as your primary music source? Even at home? I dont. I drive trucks so I listen to mine a LOT! Like others here I too despise Itunes, but the sound quality from these old Ipods is very good! How are the DAC's in your phone?

I certainly wouldn’t use a phone (or an iPod) as a primary source at home, but in a car, it’s more than adequate. With the right Android phones, you can use a huge micro SD card, and the DACs are perfectly fine, especially for mobile use. Virtually all streaming service apps will let you download albums, so in 2019, your solution is about 10 years out of date.
 
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