Friday, January 28, 2005

Silence Is Not Golden

Two days ago I installed the latest update for my iPod. It told me to charge the iPod so that the update would happen, but on returning it to my laptop, iTunes told me the update had failed, try again.

So I did, and this time iTunes said that it couldn't read the iPod and I'd have to Restore Factory Settings. Since this means losing ALL data on the iPod, I'm guessing this is a nice way of saying "rewrite the table of contents and stick basic files back on".

Obviously I'm in no hurry to wipe the iPod - unlike some of the kids I was out with on Tuesday, my laptop can't hold my entire iPod collection - it's hard disk is smaller than the iPod's (just). So for me to rebuild my music collection on it would take a long, long time.

I think of a solution: take the iPod into the lab at uni, dump its content onto one of the laptops there, then get iTunes to import all the songs again. I may lose some track information (I'm not sure if all data is stored in ID3 tags or elsewhere), but that can be fixed over time.

But before I waste a day doing that, maybe I should check with Apple, see if they've got any better ideas. I called tech support last night and got an intelligent Irish guy who gave me a few unnofficial tips that might work, including installing an older version of iTunes to see if it has problems accessing the iPod.

Good idea. Wish I'd thought of that. It's not like a fresh install of iTunes is going to Restore Factory Settings on an iPod WITHOUT ASKING ME FIRST, is it? That would be idiocy. Apple are smarter than that, or so I'm told.

10 minutes later and my iPod is blank.

So this morning I'm in the lab, having just spent £18 on the only file recovery software I could find that was able to recover my MP3s. I don't like throwing money at stupid problems like this, and I like paying for software even less (not that I steal any, just that it's been a long time since I had to buy any). All I can say is this better work!

1 Comments:

Blogger Crefakis said...

Unlucky, you could always find some kind of ripping software, or find someone with a mac, then tell them to get ipod rip, rip you music off, wipe your pod, puyt your music back on, and slyly steal all of their music while you do it.

i suppose its too late now.

12:32 pm  

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