iPod for a Month

It's been a while since I've made a post, but I've had this one planned for about a month now and just haven't gotten around to writing it. I bought an iPod classic, or whatever the hell they call the 6th generation of iPod. I'll get into my reasons in a bit, but first, I want to skip to the end and answer the question "in your mind in a way that doesn't require 10 minutes and 4 ads as most of the influencers covering these damned things on the tube. Go ahead, ask away.

Should I buy an iPod?

No. It doesn't make music sound any better and without mods doesn't hold as many songs as the $200 smartphone in your pocket. It's slow, makes funny noises, takes forever to switch over to (if you're using a service like Spotify), and doesn't actually have great battery life if you're actually using it. Just use your phone, which you charge every night and use for everything else anyway.

But what if I don't want to use my phone?

Now you're getting somewhere. This was the exact reason I got my iPod. I no longer trust myself with having a smartphone, and so I've very quickly ripped it out of my life as much as possible.

You still should just get a decent mp3 player. It'll have all the same features and cost about the same, and you won't have to worry about changing the battery or anything like that. I got an iPod because I found it for cheap on facebook marketplace.

How are you using it?

I mostly use it at work, where I'm able to have headphones in my ears for just about my entire shift. Originally, I just used Youtube, Spotify, and an audiobook app, but obviously I stopped having access to those on the go when I tossed the smartphone. The iPod came in and replaced all of those functions.

How is your iPod set up?

I don't use the native OS. Rockbox is a third party OS which allows one to just drag files into folders on the device, plays more formats (including the coveted FLAC(more on this later)), and is more battery efficient. Being able to avoid iTunes entirely is nice, and it makes the iPod work more or less like a regular mp3. That's about it on the software side.

So, what made it so long to switch over?

Let me write out the steps which would have been the most efficient to take. If I had followed them from the start, it would have taken be about 4 hours to move my entire Spotify library over. It took me 9.

  1. Set up Soundiiz and pay them 5 dollars for a 1 month. I'm sure there's a free method of doing the next step, but Soundiiz saved some headache.
  2. Create a sync between your spotify playlist or liked library and a new playlist in youtube. DO NOT SYNC TO YOUTUBE MUSIC. Youtube's playlist system is just ass now, and you can't easily turn your liked music on Youtube Music into a playlist for the next step. It took me hours to realize this, trying to find scripts that allowed me to copy all of youtube music into a playlist and back again. Just don't.
  3. Use Stacher7 to download the entire playlist to an audio format of your choice. It's just a GUI for youtube-dl, but it works. Make sure to also check the options for saving metadata and thumbnails, which will make the organization part easier later on. As for audio formats, I don't recommend FLAC. The files are much bigger and actually noticeably reduce battery life. AAC is better than MP3 and works just fine.
  4. (Optional) Use Musicbrainz Picard to update the metadata and add genres. Stacher honestly does fine, but this should go through and doublecheck everything, as well as give you genre tags.
  5. Drag the files into a music folder on your iPod. If you're using Rockbox, you can then set up a database on the iPod itself which gives you better shuffling and browsing tools.

That's it. I moved over about 1500 songs with this process. In hindsight, I really should have used the opportunity to curate my music library. Some songs seemingly got corrupted in all of this mess, and honestly almost a decade of Spotify means that I've grown out of a decent portion of my playlist. Rockbox's database feature has also been finicky for me, and sometimes outright crashes when I try to get to fancy with my sorting.

What about the rest?

For youtube videos, I just use Stacher again. I don't really look at the screen for most of the videos I watch, so I've lost nothing. In fact, I do a lot more curation of the content I take in, since I have to manually download everything and load it up to the device.

For podcasts, Podcast Index basically has everything I've needed to look for, with exception to one which I download directly from a blog. You could also almost definitely set up an RSS feed for this stuff, but I just haven't bothered yet.

For audiobooks, I just use whatever format they come in. How you access them is up to you, and there are a myriad of ways to acquire them legally and illegally. There's probably a way around audible DRM too, I have no idea.

So has it actually helped?

Honestly? yeah. It hasn't been a grand panacea to turn me into a 10x productive beast, but having less easy dopamine around has made moderation a lot easier. I'm not technically smartphone-less right now. I was using an android flip-phone for a while, and I've very recently gotten my hands on an e-ink smartphone with a keyboard. Both of these phones suck, but suck in very good ways. I still want the convenience and safety found in having a good transit app and uber, and now I can have that without youtube or discord. I also wear a watch now. I guess I'm a watch guy (Casio F91-W by the way, absolute unit of a watch).

Moral of the story? Don't do what I did, unless you have similar problems to me. Then do something else anyway.