the iPod: days of future past

originally written 04.04.24

There’s something magical about myself and music. I’ve listened to music all my life — from my mom loaning me her CD book full of gospel music like it was a rite of passage, to listening to the alarm clock radio under the covers at night to fall asleep, to burning and ripping music from YouTube like it was nobody’s business, to mixing and matching MP3 players because they were all different sizes and I couldn’t fit all of my music on one device.

Well, there eventually was one: the iPod shuffle, surprisingly.

You see, I was certainly a digital music collector back in the day. I still am, to a degree — while my original iTunes library has been wiped and completely lost to time, some of the wreckage has survived through my old devices I used to sync to it back in the day, and that’s how I’ve rebuilt my library—and still add on to it—to this very day. I have always been an advocate of preserving music, and having it all live on Spotify is not the answer.

Did I fall into that trap of having everything on Spotify? Yes, unfortunately. But I’m changing that, and going back to my old digital music hoarder ways.

I recently came across an old iPod Classic 5th Generation at work — we recycle batteries at work, and sometimes devices like these end up with us somehow. This lonely iPod laid amongst the pile, and I thought to myself about my younger days. Laying under my covers and just blissfully listening to my iPod shuffle that I had just loaded to the brim with my favorite video game remixes. “I bet I could do something with this,” I said, pocketing it and taking it home.

And six months later, I sure did do something to it. A bigger and better battery, an iFlash microSD board to replace the spinning hard drive, and a transparent face plate later, I bought the parts to resurrect it from the dead (thanks Phene for the multiple 30-pin chargers). She is as good as new, and working great.

And now, here I am. It’s 9:28pm, and I’m laying under the covers, typing this out as I listen to some of the greatest video game and chiptune music ever created. Totally worth it.