So about 6 months ago i came across a youtube video discussing how awesome ipods can be for listening to music. i was intrigued and began doing more research into how they can be an alterative to today's streaming method of music consumption. This spring I got my hands on a fifth generation ipod from facebook marketplace, unfortunately i was scammed and it did not work. I did however buy a working one from ebay, so I now own 1.5 fifth generation ipods.
While my ipod worked great in the factory condition i decided to upgrade after owning it for a couple weeks.
history:
the ipod was first introduced in 2001 and quickly became a ubiquitous portable mp3 player that dominated the 2000's music landscape. the fifth generation of ipods, released in 2005, added video and photo capabilities as well as general improvements.
all the ipods of this form factor have relatively similar internal construction, with the battery, storage, and mainboards being in the same place.
all ipods from apple's original ipod lineup used a mechanical hard drive, while they were the optimal method twenty years ago when flash was not viable from a capacity and cost perspective, today the landscape has changed.
flash storage has advanced to the point where an off the shelf sd card is a far better alternative for use in an ipod.
thanks to the company iFlash, adapters for the ipod's internal hard drive connector exist to attach standard sd cards onto an ipod.
For my ipod i got a single 128gb sd card, purchased a iflash adapter and was able to set up the device relatively easily.
as i discovered after getting things set up, a detail not often talked about in flash modding ipods is the fact that the sd card must be formatted properly before it can be installed.
the operating system for an ipod is installed on the hard drive and it needs to be installed on the new storage, luckly this is very easy. One can simply connect the ipod to a computer that has itunes, and it will be recognized as an ipod in recovery mode and have its OS reinstalled.
in a perfect world where I was using the ipod as apple intended, the drive could be reformatted through itunes as many times as i liked or i could replace the drive with other ipod. this is not the case with a random sd card
while the exact reason for why this is necessary is unknown as apple's software is proprietary but the sd card must have its information modified using third party software in order to work correctly.
this explanation for how to modify the the Master Boot Record (MBR) and partition table for the sd card was very helpful:
www.iflash.xyz/prepare-sdxc-exfat-for-use-with-the-ipod/
music for the ipod
Overall, having an ipod from 2005 has been an amazing experience for me. adding music is quite an easy process, although itunes is required. Windows has an itunes app and older versions of macOS come with itunes, however newer macs have the ipod communication built into finder, making no app necessary.
itunes has a simple drag and drop interface for audio files, it also has the ability to rip cds, although i've never used that functionality.
There are three ways to get audio for an ipod:
a. buy music on itunes
b. rip cds
c. get audio files from the internet
one might get the impression that item b. is on the grey side of legality, however people have been ripping cds and putting them on their ipods for over 20 years and the process is completely legal.
I use a software called EAC (Exact audio Copy) to get the files from my cds onto my computer because it outputs lossless audio files which are far superior to mp3s in quality.
While eac works great, the files it outputs lack sufficient metadata for an ipod. I don't know if this fact is true for other ripping software but i would assume that the issue is also there.
Eac outputs seperate files for each track on a cd with file names that included the track number/name, artist, and album. in a separate file there is the same information allong with the cover art, which is quite practical for some media softwares, yet it is not compatible with itunes.
my solution to deal with the metadata was a program to add and edit metadata. currently i am using mp3tag, although i've heard good things about picard, i dont use it. mp3tag adds full metadata to files, including the album covers, all of which are necessary for files to be displayed correctly on an ipod (although album art is a nice to have, it is not required).
now if you're not interested in spending the time needed to rip and modify files there are other ways to get music for an ipod, though they may not be legal. Hypothetically speaking, apps exist to pull mp3 files from youtube videos which can then be added to an ipod. sofrware like mp3tag can be used for correctly format the metadata for use in an ipod, making it a faster solution compared to ripping cds. While this is an incredibly convenient and free option, it may violate copyright law.