


This allows you to bypass iTunes completely, and just load music up in disk mode, which could be pretttty useful.
Turn off notifications lastfm scrobbler portable#
RockboxĪfter reading my last post, someone helpfully left a comment pointing me towards the existence of Rockbox – a free, open source bit of software that replaces the OEM music management functions on a whole variety of different portable players, including the iPod. Definitely not for the faint hearted… or if you are crap at DIY like myself. You also need to find a place to put the USB port (or pull the power from the usual 40 pin connector), and that means making a new hole in the case. I’m not 100% on the best way to wire this together, and lithium ion batteries are a bit of a fire risk if you cock things up. This is probably the most tricky of all the modifications though.
Turn off notifications lastfm scrobbler install#
In theory, if you have already modified your iPod to use a flash drive, then there is space inside the case to install the board, and you can then avoid the firewire problem completely. This is essentially just a small PCB which lets you charge up batteries over USB. It appears that some enterprising folks have found a way to address this problem though, using a MICRO USB 1A Battery Charging Module TP4056. If you’re travelling, that means no USB power bank to juice up the thing easily. These are bulky, getting harder to come buy, and increasingly pricey. This means that you need a specific cable and plug to charge the bloody thing, or a dock. Wild! USB ChargingĪs I mentioned in my last post, despite being arguably the most beautiful of all the iPods, the big issue with the 3rd Gen Classic is that it only charges over Firewire. As well as kind of cheap standard CF to IDE adaptors, there’s a brand called iFlash which makes specific adaptors to allow you to use up to 4 SD cards in one iPod. However… now, there are a bunch of different options for using the much cheaper and higher capacity SD/MicroSD cards in old iPods. However, this was reportedly flakey, and so it’s not a route I went down in the end. Last.FM.īack when I was looking at options for increased storage in the iPod, there was talk of being able to use Compact Flash cards to store the songs, instead of the bulky hard drives they were designed to work with. Essentially, you listen to tracks on your iPod (making sure the date and time are set correctly), plug it in to your computer, open up LastPod, make sure it knows where your iPod database is (a quick config that persists after the first time), and then… you can scrobble your tracks! There are a couple of caveats, including the limitation of only being able to scrobble each song once (so it can’t track multiple listens), and that you need to synch your iPod with iTunes or whatever after you Scrobble to reset the counters… but! It works, and I am unreasonably happy about this.

I’m not sure how I never found this before, but I thought I would share as it’s the only solution that I’ve found which does the job. There were some tools available, but none of them really worked… and come on, I even scrobble my LPs with Vinyl Scrobbler, so it seemed ridiculous that I couldn’t do that with the iPod.Īs luck would have it, I came across a little Java application called LastPod which solves this problem. It might sound ridiculous, but one of the things I really missed when using my beloved 3rd Gen iPod was the ability to log all of the music I listen to using Last.FM, as I use that data to help discover new artists, and a bunch of other things. I could have found YouTube fame.Īnyway, what I did find was that there were now a whole host of resources for modifying and restoring these old iPods which weren’t necessarily available, or as clear as they were when I first started looking into them – and it’s piqued my intrigue for how I could expand on, or revisit this project. Maybe I should have made more of an effort to document things back in 2016 when I started working on these old iPods. There’s even someone called DankPods who has racked up 600k subscribers in only a year. While looking into how they had managed it, I fell down the rabbit hole of what has apparently become a fairly active iPod modification/restoration community. Seeing this, a friend shared an article with me about someone who had taken things a step further, and basically rebuilt his entire 4th Gen iPod to stream from Spotify. In that, I outlined my various mis-adventures upgrading the battery, hard drive, replacing the clickwheel electronics, the case, and… well. Last year I finally pulled together a post for a project that I had begun years ago, but never written up: Restoring a 3rd Generation iPod Classic.
