Sunday, January 27, 2013

"Like The Weather" - Rocking It Old School...

Anyone remember the first generation iPod?  I still have mine!  Granted, it has probably seen better days and barely keeps a charge for very long, but I still have a lot of love for this device.

I had asked for one for Christmas, so I could avoid toting around a load of CDs to work.  My mom thought it was ridiculously priced and could not see the point of something that expensive.  Later, she came to love the iPod.

I was determined to get an iPod.  I had some money saved up, so out came "Frugal Melissa".  I fought with myself on which one to get, how much to spend, and all of that.  Finally, I settled on getting the 15 Gb iPod.  At the time, you had the choice of using firewire or USB connectivity.  The PC my father and I put together did not have either type of connectivity, so I bought a firewire card and installed it.

The first song I put on the iPod was No Doubt's "It's My Life."  I played it over and over.  Over the next few months, I spent my time loading iTunes with music.  I found it easy to create CD mixes to put in the CD player in my car.  I was completely smitten.

A year later, I needed a faster system, so my father and I did our shopping thing at Fry's and bought the stuff to set up a new system.  I transferred my music from one PC over to the new PC.  However, my new PC became victim to a few viruses and I ended up wiping out my hard drive a few times.  At the time, I knew if I plugged in my iPod, there was no way I could pull the music from the iPod over to the PC.  Furthermore, I could very well chance a wipe out.  That is really no good!

I ended up getting an 80 GB iPod and starting over with that device.  I had barely scratched the surface on that iPod and the hard drive on my PC went out again.  Talk about massive frustration!

Since that time, I have put my library on a separate hard drive and keep it backed up.  We put a lot of time into loading those devices.  It is a real shame to lose all of that hard work and I had done it TWICE!

The other day, I saw this iPod in a mesh bag with its power supply.  I toyed around with the idea of hooking up the iPod and see if I could pull the data off of it.  I tried that last night, but it did not work, so I started searching the internet for a tool that would do it.  I found one.  iMac iPod to PC.  I installed it on a lap top where I do not have iTunes installed.  Once the first generation iPod was connected to the PC, the software was able to see all of the music files.  I am able to export the data to the PC or install iTunes and export the music data there. 

So, my next techie project will be to get one of my 500 Gb portable drives connected and export the music on all of my iPods and put it into a new library.  I might even be able to take the new library I have generated for my iPhone and combine the two.  This would be great!  Of course, I will take MASSIVE back ups.  :-)

I do still love the old iPod.  It was cool and it started a huge trend that no one else could even come close to matching. 

So, when I saw this old iPod the other day, I took it to work and listened to it when I was not on a conference call.  It was great to rock out to the old music on the old iPod.  As I write this post, I am listening to a classic - 10,000 Maniacs - "Like the Weather" - Join in and enjoy:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtYP7AvLKHk

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