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  2. I’ve got several, including an original click wheel model, which I can’t charge because I can’t find the right Firewire cable, ie Firewire one end, USB the other, or even an adapter.

    I’ve also got a Classic, with a 500GB SSD installed by some genius on eBay. I’m assuming it’ll outlast me…

  3. I’ve got two 160GB iPod Classics in good condition gathering dust and an old 60GB one with a duff hard drive. I used to use one or other of the Classics when I had to commute to work every day on the Tube, but being retired I’m spared the horrors of commuting these days.
    My phone can be plugged into my car stereo, or used with earbuds on my very infrequent train journeys. It has a good selection of a few hundred fave tunes on it.
    It could probably do with updating now, but it’s a bit of a faff deciding what to put on it and what to leave off.
    In that respect, the 160GB Classic was a step too far if you have a big music collection. Deciding what goes on is a mammoth task in itself and then waiting for it to transfer takes bloody ages. You need to set aside a weekend for the job, realistically.

    Which brings me to a question that @SteveT might possibly know a trick for. The headphone socket on my phone is a bit cantankerous lately. I sometimes have to wiggle the plug a bit to get the right channel on my earbuds. Especially if I haven’t used my earbuds for a while. I suspect a little bit of corrosion or dirt. No problem with the earbuds on other devices. Is there a trick for cleaning the socket without having to dismantle the device?

              • I think – er, Mrs F tells me – that stylus cleaning fluid smells like nail varnish remover.

                I’m not sure of its electrical conducting properties, but at least it will look nice and shiny.

                • Nail varnish remover used to be, maybe still is, comprised mainly of Acetone, which we used to use, in a factory I once worked at in the early ’70s, for cleaning printed circuit boards of flux after they had been soldered.
                  Isopropyl alcohol is much less pungent-smelling.

                  • Seems likely that stylus cleaner is the best idea. My bottle doesn’t disclose what’s in it. I’ll use the jack plug technique of putting it on the males and, error, repeatedly inserting it.

                    Makes me think, actually, that switch cleaner must be favourite Shirley? My mixer started crapping out on random channels and after I gave each socket a shot of switch cleaner and a vigorous rogering with the relevant jack plug all was happy again.

                    • So the news is I used stylus cleaner, which handily has a brush built into the lid, gave the Lightening plug and IpPod socket a rub a dub and it is lovely now. No “No Data” messages etc and I swear it sounds better*.

                      * probably psychological but this is how popular myths start. Apple fanboi forums await.

      • Last week I took my 160GB classic out of hibernation. Everything on it is from a long dead laptop so I’m not minded to fiddle about. Pressed play on ‘artists’ and 600 tracks later I’ve got to the letter B.

    • A 3.5mm jack plug socket can be carefully cleaned with a cotton bud. You may have to take some of the cotton off to get it in the socket. Try with just breath first. A drop of meths, lighter fluid or electrical switch cleaner on the bud won’t hurt, and will remove any grease.

    • Frustratingly, my last MacBook got something stuck in the headphone socket which was just impossible to remove. Tried a few Mac repair places and got the same gloomy “Can’t do anything” – the entire unibody would have to be removed. Absurd, for want of a nail and all that.

  4. I have had at least 3 basic ones (plus a few iPod touches), one at home won’t boot up, I lost a 160GB Classic when playing golf and the other one is with my ex and still works, that one being an ancient 40GB model from about 20 years ago,

  5. I have a 160g Classic which I use regularly in the car, which has no Bluetooth but does have iPod integration. I have a new shrink wrapped Classic which I bought when they discontinued it too, as a backup.

  6. I use a classic, but am unable to remove it from the Bose dock as it closes down when I do. A battery issue I presume. I prefer to have my music on tap rather than having to search on Spotify or anywhere else.

  7. This is spot on. My Classic gave up the ghost a while back and I do miss it. The phone and Spotify is fine but it doesn’t come close to having my entire record collection on one device, offline, and being able to hit shuffle on it.

  8. Another diehard here, a 120 go f,Passaic which I bought from CEX about two years ago when when my previous one, bought new about 12 years before, gave of its little hard disc ghost. I could put a card in my phone and get more on it, but I like the iPod.

    • @Freddy-Steady @Blue-Boy Freddy – I hope your files are backed up somewhere and not just on your iPod.

      I am more than happy with my little FiiO M7 – smaller than an iPod (but thicker and with sharper corners). Sounds better (imho) and can handle HD music files. Has up to date Bluetooth if you wanted to use an unwired pair of phones or a BT speaker. The rotary clicked volume control is great and not obtrusive… Go on treat yourself (@£150).

      View post on imgur.com

      View post on imgur.com

      • Thanks, that’s good to know – I haven’t had any experience / reviews of the new M series.

        I bought a very early M series years ago and it was fairly rubbish, shortly replaced by a X1.

      • @craig42blue and @fentonsteve

        Thank you both. I am mentally prepared for the day my Classic dies and I’m equally mentally prepared to go for a Fiio. I’m just a bit of a technophobe so how will I get my songs from iTunes onto the aforementioned Fiio cos it’s dead easy with iTunes and an iPod. Just sync.

        • I don’t Mac, so I can only comment on Windows. The Fiio appears either as a Mass Storage Device (like a USB memory stick) or MTP. You go to your iTunes folders in File Explorer and copy them across to the Fiio. Simples.

          The Fiio won’t play DRM content (iTunes Music Store purchases from prior to 2009). You can spot these, if you have any, as they have 128kb/s bit rate (iTunes Plus DRM-free files were encoded at 256k, so they sound better too). If you can’t do iTunes Match to get the Plus files, there are tools out there to help.

  10. I use my iPods all the time. I have two Classics. Sadly, even with two, I can’t get all my music on them but I can get most of it. They plug directly into my car and that’s how I listen to podcasts as well as music. I don’t use the headphone socket that often but I’ve never had a problem.
    I can’t imagine using my phone to listen to music. You need to be connected to t’internet don’t you. Impossible to get a mobile connection where I work, so it wouldn’t work on my commutes.
    Long live my iPods.

        • My Android phone has no card slot but it has 32GB built-in and I find that’s enough, really. Only 1.53GB of choice music on it.
          I should really do a cull on the photos and videos and refresh, possibly slightly increase the music content, which has been unchanged for about 5 years now.

  11. Got given a 30gb ipod back in 2006 when i left a long term job. The headphone socket died 5 years later, bought a 4th generation ipod touch 64gb. its last me 9 years – used daily – a wonderful device. Its now fragile. Looking to replace………………..thought of a sony walkman nwa45, also possibly a cheaper mp3 player with 128gb sd card. Itunes is both a wonder and an arse. Id find it hard to leave the playlists behind, i know you can export to WMA or sony music center but right now reckon spending £100 on a 6th gen ipod160gb classic from music magpie or CEX is my best bet. Ipod Touch still being made but apps wont work once your version of IOS is dead. Seems ipod classic is best way to go…………….unless anyone can suggest otherwise???

  12. My iPods are possibly the best things I’ve ever owned. They get used every day and I’m constantly tinkering around with them. In fact, I’ve spent the past two days (and I haven’t finished yet) doing a massive shuffle round of them all to accommodate the ridiculous amount of reggae and jazz albums I’ve amassed over the past few weeks. The problem is that I can only fit around half my music library on the 3 iPods, so I am continually agonising about what to remove.

    I was even considering buying a fourth the other day, but instead decided to be a bit more ruthless. To start with, I decided I didn’t need 16 full Springsteen concerts on one of them, particularly as I had spent ages making a playlist of my favourite live version of all his tracks. I also rarely leave the house these days (and even less recently!), so I’ve been taking stuff off the iPods that I have on CD. Sorted!

    I sent one of my iPods off to a company that installed a 500gb SSD a couple of years ago, but it kept crashing every time I tried to fill it. I sent it back three times and each time they replaced the drive and returned it to me saying it was fine. Eventually, after trawling through techy websites, I found the reason. I can’t tell the difference between a lossless file and one at 128kbps, so I downgrade all my tracks to save space and get more on the iPods. It seems that iPods can only cope with a certain amount of tracks (about 40,000, maybe a bit less), no matter how big the hard drive is. So I had effectively tripled the size of the hard drive to add 10% more tracks!

    • The major drawback with the iPod for me is that it can’t play .flac files and these days a large and increasing proportion of my digital music is .flac files. Makes for an extra-slow experience when loading the iPod with music, as they have to be converted/compressed either beforehand or as they load. Loading 160GB of files takes a fair bit of time over a USB cable as it is.

  13. I had a creative zen, didn’t look as cool but a lot more useful played a lot more file types and didn’t use iTunes which was a massive bonus.

    Sony are still keeping the dream alive with a new range of mp3 Walkman. The top of the line one (300 quid!) even plays a video of a cassette tape when it plays. Which looks much cooler than it sounds.

  14. I think I now feel officially old, because I still think of iPods as new fangled technology that I am still suspicious of. Over the years I owned a classic and a couple of shuffles, and I frequently found myself in a cycle of clicking through songs wondering what to play next and never settling on anything. That problem escalated exponentially when Spotify etc came along.

    Miss my ipod? I miss my walkman!

  15. If you’re using an iPod you can avoid iTunes misery by getting CopyTrans. Maybe iTunes is better these days but for me it was always the drawback with iPods. I have a nano that I use for running but haven’t used my classic for years. 10 years ago I couldn’t have imagined life without it.

  16. I loved my ipod and if it played FLAC I would probably still be using it. The Fiio is great sounding, but the interface and the ease of playlist editing on the ipod was a joy to use

  17. Still using my 120gb classic on an almost daily basis. Never had any real problems with iTunes, just a bit of effort when adding so that correct artwork is there and things are sorted in the way I prefer, and Robert is your mother’s brother.

  18. A feeble voice raised in support of the Touch. I was a total Classic (whatever) fanboy. I’ve had four, and they’ve all bricked. My last still limps along with a replacement battery that bleeds power even when turned off (and I do mean turned off, not put to sleep). I eventually caved and bought a Touch. I hated it at first, feeling I’d betrayed my old Classic, but its brilliance as an entertainment device is unmatched. No, it doesn’t hold as many tunes, but enough, and I frequently change the music to reflect what I’m digging, man. Albums I once thought essential that I haven’t listened to in years get relegated to an external hard drive vault.

    I don’t “browse the internet” or communicate with anyone on it, but I do use it for listening to vintage radio shows from the 40s and 50s, my current passion and a very nice pillow-listening experience (no earbuds, just sandwiched between your ear and the pillow).

    Finding music – and shuffling it – are both easier and quicker on the Touch. I don’t miss the click wheel and found that gushing over it on the video a bit daft. I think you can enable a click sound on the Touch, should you want it that badly. The Touch is also considerably lighter and easier to carry. The weight of the Classic lends it a solidity not backed up by the mechanics.

    The other great thing about the Touch is its camera functionality. Who needs a camera any more? The other great thing is that it’s not a phone. I have a phone (somewhere) but I never use it (yes, yes, I’m lucky, I know). The other great thing is that you can read books on it, perfectly easily. I binge read all the Jack Reachers on my Touch. The other great thing (that’s how many already?) is that although it comes loaded with Apple lures to seduce you into the creepy Apple product world, you don’t have to turn them on. My Touch is disconnected from everything except my Mac, which is also disconnected from the App store, Amazon, and similar eyes-in-the-pyramid. I suppose some malign intelligence could find out where I am in the world, but the Immigration Service already knows.

    If I’d been told at the age of – ooh – eleven that the future would include a device that did all that, AND play movies!!!, and I could carry it in my pocket, I’d have said “gosh!”. Probably.

    The other thing that goes unmentioned in that video is that the whole deal depends on that much-maligned music format, the mp3. Yay for that. The most fun since the 45rpm single.

  19. I have an iPod classic lying around in a drawer. I use my phone now instead. It’s one less device to clutter up my pockets when on the increasingly rare occasions I venture out. A large SD card full of tunes, wireless headphones and mobile music listening is so much less troublesome.
    Why does anyone bother with a DAP anymore? I’d genuinely like to know as I can’t see the advantage over just using your phone.

    • Sorry, Pencil, I missed this.

      A few reasons.

      Firstly, with no phone bits to operate, the battery in your DAP will last a lot longer. Secondly, many can access more than one micro-SD card (so twice as much music). Thirdly, taking out the phone-related bits makes room for bigger and better audio bits.

      Finally, no bugger can ring me up in the middle of listening to an album. Perhaps I am unusually anti-social…

  21. Bought a 7th gen 160gb ipod classic from CEX last week, spent £6 on a cover and screen protector from amazon. Loving it. Still have 85gb memory spare. I am very happy with this, no apps, no phone calls, just music and podcasts. Might load some audiobooks too, decent battery life. £100 well spent and a 2 year warranty included.

  22. Found an old Creative Zen player which is still in good condition but needs either XP or Windows 7 to manage the content. Fortunately I’ve got an old netbook which seems to do the trick. I’ve never owned an iPod.

    • One of my colleagues left to join Creative and to work on the Zen X-Fi (we went out for dinner with the Creative team after a trade show somewhere in Germany). Within a year or two, of course, it all got mothballed. I think he’s still in Singapore.

  23. just yesterday I fired up my Ipod shuffles (apparently I have 3, though 2 used to be the kids) in anticipation of the gyms eventually reopening. They are great for that sort of thing.
    Otherwise I just use my phone now.
    Which is a shame because I love my 1st generation Ipod nano – its just such a SF piece of kit. But I no longer need it.

  25. Late last year I acquired a Integra 256GB micoSD card for under £30 and stuck in my Android phone. I’ve now got over 600 lossless albums in my pocket, and some of those are very large classical sets.

    Luckily my current Android phone can handle a card of that size as it supports exFAT. Some phones only support the older FAT32 system which is limited to 32GB. Some phones get around this limit by changing some of the FAT32 parameters, but it can lead to problems reading or writing the card elsewhere.

    Another problem I’ve found is that there’s apparently no Android music player app that supports sort-order tags, at least amongst the ones I’ve tried. Apple’s devices do, as did the media player on Windows Mobile. When I purchased the card I planned to use my old Windows phone as a stop-gap media player, but I accidentally cracked the screen a day before the card arrived!

    • Pulsar+ supports all manner of tags in the paid version which is very cheap. Don’t know if that includes sort though. Works for me anyway. What I haven’t really sorted out is a client for the PC to manager it – Media Monkey would probably do it but I haven’t got around to it. I’ve got 100g of my 120g card free so I should really.

      • I’ve tried Pulsar already – it didn’t support these tags at all, and couldn’t handle some of my files at all. It’s essentially a new front-end for Google’s own built-in player, which has exactly the same problems with the same files.

        For syncing at the moment I just use a file mirroring tool to sync my laptop’s iTunes library to the memory card, and also to an external drive for use in a music server and backup. I’ll eventually migrate to a dedicated music server with drive redundancy, but that won’t be this year.

        • Shuttle+ supposedly does support sort order, in the paid-for version, but the customer reviews for it don’t look particularly good to me.
          The Windows app that supports them best is reputedly MusicBee, but the sole developer has stated that he has no interest in producing an Android version, despite many requests.

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