Breathing Room at Last

If you recall, since Apple discontinued the iPod Classic, I’ve had a number of discussions about what my path forward should be. I initially thought about going with a non-iPod device (also here). But each had its limitations, including cost and abandoning my carefully curated playcounts and ratings in iTunes. Then I discovered another approach: modification of the iPod Classic to add more storage. But I’m a software guy. Modding hardware is outside my comfort zone. So I decided to do some men normally don’t do: ask for help. I found someone local, and… voila! Here’s a before and after picture. Note the “Capacity:” line, and the amount of free space:

Before

After

Ah, breathing room. It is wonderful. A 512GB iPod Classic, for a cost of about $300. I used the iFlash Dual SD Adapter from Tarkan, two PNY Elite Performance SDXC 256 GB UHS-3 Memory Cards, and the help of Juan Salinas, who I met through the Tarkan boards. Juan took care of the hardware end over the weekend, as I’m a software guy (and he did a great job — things loaded just fine — did it in alphabetic chucks and it took about 5 hours).

After about 6 months of use, it will be Segundo’s turn to be upgraded to Segundo Prime. I have no plans to upgrade to iTunes 12. I believe Apple has moved iTunes to the direction of pushing cloud storage instead of on-device; I do not want to move in that direction.

P.S.: Pioneer has a $700 DAP that can go to 256GB, for $700 plus 2x128GB cards. Onkyo just announced a new DAP with a max of 482GB in micro-SD cards for $899, not including the SD cards. How puny. With the Tarkan approach, one could go to 1TB! (Of course, the iTunes database maxes out a 66K songs, supposedly).

P.P.S: Primero Prime Post Upgrade Status:

• Day U (Upgrade)+1: One spontaneous update in the morning. Driving home, a reboot after the podcast, and then about 4-5 more reboots — some due to complete freezes, others due to interface freezes. Note that the drive home includes a power connection through a DC adaptor that could be flakier. Last reboot seemed to solve problems.
• Day U+2: No reboots in the morning. For the drive home, ran Primero Prime off battery only. One reboot in the evening, before the podcast while switching playlists. Otherwise fine.
• Day U+3: No reboots in the morning, during the day, or on the drive home (on battery). Perhaps it is settling in.
• Day U+4: No reboots in the morning. Again, on battery for the drive home, and got one reboot when traversing menus. Otherwise, again, fine.
• Days U+5, U+6, U+7: No reboots. I’m beginning to think the reboot is unrelated to iDual and more related to age (and spurious signals from the click wheel, as this happened occasionally before the surgery)
• Day U+2 Weeks: Had a number of reboots and freezes yesterday. Could get a reliable freeze from the 2nd song on a 37000+ playlist, but that song played fine when chosen from a 11000+ playlist… and the 2nd song position on the 37000+ playlist was fine after a resync. Most occurred when touching the click wheel or navigating. It has been fine since.

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