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.
The Mini and the 4G are flash modded to 128gb, both have new batteries. The 5G is a stock 30gb spinning HDD, partly because it still works fine, and partly because I currently lack the disposable income to mod it.
The 5G is actually two broken ones combined. I was lucky enough to score the 4 and 5 together from Facebook for about £12. The HDD in the 4 was cooked, so needed replacing anyway, but I couldn’t get the 5 to do much of any use, because the click wheel wouldn’t register any touches. Took it apart and found it was slightly water damaged.
So I eventually picked up another 5G with a shagged battery and broken screen off eBay for £20. Turned out the battery in my original one was actually good still, so I transplanted that and the good screen into the ‘newer’ 5G, and am now the proud owner of a perfect working 30gb iPod for the grand total of £26.
The 4G refuses to charge via USB for reasons it won’t share with me. I thought the original battery was toast, but it seems that it was actually probably fine, just wasn’t charging properly. Picked up a FireWire brick and cable for £35, and the 4G has been a solid device ever since. Purely because of the charging issues though, I’ve been pondering selling the 4G. I’ve spent about £50 on it, so if I can recoup that, then I can happily mod the 5G to 512gb and have my foreverPod. But the 4G is just so pretty, that I can’t bear to part with it…