Resurrecting an actual iPod

[Quarthinos]

We just got done unpacking everything now that the damage the tree did to our house has been fixed. My wife wants to listen to some tunes, and the easiest place to get all her ripped CDs is off a really old iPod. I don't know which generation it is. it not a nano, and has two buttons, the home button and the "sleep button". It doesn't appear to have bluetooth and doesn't seem to have a real speaker capable of anything more than beeps and boops. We do actually have a cable for it, USB A to the wide proprietary Apple port (lightning maybe?). We also have a really old JVC multi disk CD player with a USB B port on the front prominently labelled USB AUDIO. I found a USB A to USB B converter plug, but connecting the iPod to the JVC and switching to USB Audio in isn't making music come out. Have I forgotten something about how iPod worked back in the day, like a different cable or something? The iPod works fine if you plug headphones into the headphone jack, and plugging into a USB port allows a PC to recognize the device as an iPod. I guess I can go buy an 3.5mm male to male cable and use the AUX in on the JVC, but I've already bought the converter, and now I'm curious what I'm doing wrong.

I did a bit of googling, but all the posts I can find links to on the apple forums are talking about iPhones, as if iPods never existed.

 

[rain shadow]

Sounds like a 3rd gen iPod shuffle?

The CD player with a B port would not be capable of acting as a host device

The ipod would have come with some in-ear headphones that had volume and skip buttons on the headphone cable. Without that the functionality is kind of limited.

 

[Quarthinos]

From the talk about a host device, I guess the USB spec requires one side or the other to start some kind of handshake and both sides are waiting for the other to start? I guess wishing software would work just like hardware with a simple easy-to-understand abstraction is too much too ask when USB is supposed to do everything? I mean, I just need the sound data to go down the cable from one end to the other. Or even just the encoded data, the CD player is MP3 capable. If I push play on the iPod when it's all connected, it thinks it's playing the song, but I guess it's just routing the sound to the headphone jack.

A set of Sony headphones work, so I guess the tip contacts are (mostly?) compatible with a standard headphone jack. Time to go back to MicroCenter and see if they have the stuff RadioShack used to have back in the day.

 

[timezon3]

I mean, I just need the sound data to go down the cable from one end to the other.

Definitely not how it works. I'm not sure how old this thing is. Originally, the ipod basically showed up as a mass storage device, and a receiver or head unit would know how to navigate the file structure, grab the song, and play it. (It was a somewhat obfuscated file system, but still accessible.) I used to do this through my car's head unit; it used a USB-A on one side (plug into the head unit), and the weird 30 pin thing on the other end. I'm not even sure if recent head units / receivers even bother to build this kind of capability in any more. But I think the device you have is one of these. If you can find an old "ipod dock" (with a speaker) it may work with that. This may be your best bet.

If it is one of these, you can probably check out the file structure by just hooking it up to a computer. You will be able to find mp3 files, but they will have random names. But I believe the id3 will still be correct. You should be able to just copy them all off the thing. This is all from memory, but I think this was how it worked with the old devices.

If it's anything more recent, the file structure is all encrypted and I don't know that there's any way to make it work with a USB connection at all.

 

[AndrewZ]

So when you plug an iPod into a WIndows PC, it immediately asks you to run or install iTunes. It used to be that iTunes was your iPod command center and would sync with your iPod, and maybe back to your PC. IPod/iTunes are considered obsolete and no longer directly supported by Apple so things have changed. Maybe find the PC that this iPod was originally sync'd with? If not, find a copy and install iTunes, see what happens.

You definitely cannot just download songs from an iPod to your PC. There is copy protection.

 

[timezon3]

You definitely cannot just download songs from an iPod to your PC. There is copy protection.

Ah, that may be, depending on the source of them in the first place. I always used to rip my CDs to (non-copy-protected) mp3s, and I used a linux program to sync them to the ipod (talking about an old ipod video model). In that case, there was no copy protection anywhere, and I'm pretty sure I could have just slurped the weirdly named mp3s off of it in disk mode. But if this ipod was always used with itunes and itunes-purchased mp3s (aacs?), copy protection may indeed be an issue. Again, this is talking about an old style of ipod. I think the switch was when they released the ipod touch, which was basically an iphone minus cell modem, so it was running for real iOS. For these models, yeah, you pretty much must use iTunes. Pre iOS, there were other options.

I still think the easiest options (if you just want to listen to the music) are the originally mentioned AUX cable or finding a dock. But if it's a pre-iOS iPod, I would at least muck through the file structure a bit and see if there are any mp3 or aac files.

 

[Lew Zealand]

It's unclear what you actually want to do here. Is your intent to simply listen to the music on the iPod, or is the goal to get access to the (I assume .mp3) files on the iPod itself?

If it's the former, and that JVC CD device you mention is plugged into some sort of receiver, you can definitely get a 3.5mm to RCA jack to plug the iPod into the receiver for not a lot of money. Pictures and/or model numbers of the things involved here might go a long way to finding a solution.

If it's the latter, it will at best be quite complicated and possibly not worth the effort.

 

[cmannes]

This reddit thread has a lot of various options for pulling music from an old iPod. It's a year old, but perhaps still something in there to try.


View: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/15n3sb4/how_to_download_music_off_old_ipod/

 

[Andrewcw]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Shuffle
Which one do you have out of curiosity?. And the answer it doesn't really matter. Get whatever music off the device. Then hope it was music bought AFTER apple stopped DRM that needed to be synced.

Because devices back in the day like gen 1-4ish Ipods and i believe the shuffles they all required iTunes or some program that wasn't sued into oblivion that communicated with the iPod Database. The iPod would not just play music copied onto it. It might show up as mass storage but it needed the files to be in the database to play.

If you're having trouble getting stuff to even play out of the 3.5" jack then the other reality is that's why it got put to the wayside because it was broken.

 

[grstanford]

I'd go to an apple store and ask them to transfer the ipod contents to your iphone or ipad (assuming you have one), then transfer them to PC from there.

 

[Quarthinos]

Thanks for all the suggestions. The immediate plan was to just listen to the music. My wife wanted to use the stereo for that purpose, but the headphones are good enough for now. The music is actually a bunch of ripped CDs, so I don't know if they were transcoded by iTunes into AACs when they were originally written to the iPod or not. Since neither of us has a working CD drive connected to a PC right now, and ripping her collection took days of work, I'll try and figure out how to get all the music moved to her iPhone. There are several CD drives around the house, just none are in a PC chassis right now. I really need to rerip my collection anyway, so maybe I'll do that for a birthday present to myself.

As far as DRM is concerned, I thought the master key for AACs has been known for a while and is floating around in various iTunes replacements, but maybe I'm thinking of DVDs.

 

[ant1pathy]

There are a few utilities that will yoink the audio files off of the iPod and drop them into a directory on a computer. If you want them off of the iPod, these are your best bet.

For using it on the stereo, an aux cord is by far your simplest solution. You can get line-out audio from the 30-pin Dock Connector, but more work than you'll likely want to put into this short term solution.

 

[Lew Zealand]

There are a few utilities that will yoink the audio files off of the iPod and drop them into a directory on a computer. If you want them off of the iPod, these are your best bet.

Yes, and post-yoink there are apps which can rename the inscrutably-named files based on their tags, but again, these proceses may not be obvious.

For using it on the stereo, an aux cord is by far your simplest solution. You can get line-out audio from the 30-pin Dock Connector, but more work than you'll likely want to put into this short term solution.

Have we confirmed this iPod has a 30-pin connector? I think the model is still unknown.

 

[ant1pathy]

Have we confirmed this iPod has a 30-pin connector? I think the model is still unknown.

We do actually have a cable for it, USB A to the wide proprietary Apple port (lightning maybe?).

From OP ^. Nothing else it could be, it's either Dock Connector or the one teeny Shuffle that charged and loaded through the headphone jack.

 

[Wrakkenruan]

Lightning is not wide. Lightning on the right; 30 pin earlier thing for my iPod Touch 4th gen (64GB - still works!) on the left.

 

[thrillhouse]

You can try third party software that may be able to read the device. Something like Media Monkey maybe?

 

[singebob]

We just got done unpacking everything now that the damage the tree did to our house has been fixed. My wife wants to listen to some tunes, and the easiest place to get all her ripped CDs is off a really old iPod. I don't know which generation it is. it not a nano, and has two buttons, the home button and the "sleep button". It doesn't appear to have bluetooth and doesn't seem to have a real speaker capable of anything more than beeps and boops. We do actually have a cable for it, USB A to the wide proprietary Apple port (lightning maybe?). We also have a really old JVC multi disk CD player with a USB B port on the front prominently labelled USB AUDIO. I found a USB A to USB B converter plug, but connecting the iPod to the JVC and switching to USB Audio in isn't making music come out. Have I forgotten something about how iPod worked back in the day, like a different cable or something? The iPod works fine if you plug headphones into the headphone jack, and plugging into a USB port allows a PC to recognize the device as an iPod. I guess I can go buy an 3.5mm male to male cable and use the AUX in on the JVC, but I've already bought the converter, and now I'm curious what I'm doing wrong.

I did a bit of googling, but all the posts I can find links to on the apple forums are talking about iPhones, as if iPods never existed.

Yeah that will never work. Unless it claims to be specifically iPod compatible, the JVC will be expecting a mass storage device at the other end of the USB cable.

Do what thrillhouse said.