The music isn't that dead...

I'm not sure now how close my iPod is to death. I think that most of the sync issues (and the iPod being wiped clean) were caused by having my phone plugged in at the same time, iTunes seems to get confused and writes enough to the iPod to erase the library file, but tries to write the new library to the phone (which doesn't work). As long as the phone isn't plugged in, things seem to sync OK this week. (I know over the weekend though that I did a number of syncs without the phone plugged into the PC, and the iPod was still corrupted...).

However, as I'm listening to music I'm hearing all sorts of bad glitches... The music generally plays, but there are noticeable audio dropouts and clicks in almost everything I listen to. When I check the same files on the PC, they are OK - so there does seem to be some ongoing hard disk problems...

I could say that I've been through a rollercoaster of emotions this week - thinking that my music player was kaput, then its back, then back to somewhere in the middle... I'm not that attached to the thing though - I do need the music to be productive at work - things seem empty without music while I'm typing. However, in the big scheme of things, my family is a lot more important than a silly piece of glass and plastic, so I'm not exactly shedding tears over the thing...

The Day the Music Died...

I am in semi-mourning... My 30GB iPod is on its last legs, dying quietly (pun intended) after only 18 months... I've started getting errors that iTunes can't read the contents of the iPod, but those only happened when I also had my phone connected to the PC, and I figured that iTunes was getting confused about driver letters. Now, the errors come every time, and the iPod has an annoying habit of coming up completely blank (no music) after finishing a 3+ hour sync (there is almost 30G of music to load, after all...). Looks like the hard drive is failing, which isn't too surprising considering all that the little box has been through. I'm still hopeful that I can get it to behave a bit more, but after 3 days it doesn't look good - something is broken. Yesterday it was really hard to get work done without some music to listen to...

So - how do I keep up with podcasts, carry around enough music to listen to, and not bust the budget (which won't easily support a replacement - not with end-of-the-month bills all due in the next week)? I'm going to try downsizing my 'carry along' music and using my Motorola Q smartphone to fill the role of music player. I have a podcast manager/player (beyondpod - available at http://www.codeplex.com/beyondpod) already loaded, which will directly pull podcasts onto the phone (no more syncing!). There is already a media player on the phone, and being a Windows Mobile based product, Windows Media Player on my PC knows how to manage the file store. Just a little problem with space.... I found a great deal on an 8GB flash memory card for the phone on Amazon.com - $37 including shipping (compared to Best Buy wanting $149.99 for the same thing).

I'll just have to work out what music to load in, I can't load everything anymore... (That was why I had the 30G iPod - I can carry my entire music collection, and am likely to always have what I'm in the mood for...) I think that with 8GB I can carry enough styles of music to manage, but it will take more work to keep things fresh and updated... We'll see how things work out, there's always Christmas coming up in 5 months!