After a long battle, and an even longer wait for shipping (Thanks, TigerDirect.com, for rushing that order like I asked), I have finally beaten the iPod Mini that C gave me.
This battle all started when we first picked it up a couple years ago. The battery would only hold a charge for about 45 minutes. As she used it in a dock at work, that wasn’t such a bad thing. But when we replaced it with a brand spanking new Nano, I took the Mini in as a pet.
Now me being the hacker1 I am, I don’t like to leave things alone. If its electronic, and there’s a way to do it, I will try to hack1 it. If I can’t do it today, but feel I will in the future, then its in my office (just ask C).
So needless to say, when I took in the Mini, it was go time. I first fiddled with new firmware like RockBox. Not liking that for the Mini, I attempted to install iPod Linux. On my first attempt, things went poorly. So I reverted to the standard firmware, and opted to hack the bits and bytes again using iPod Wizard.
Now that the Mini was running somewhat how I wanted it, I wanted to ditch iTunes.
You see, with all the other MP3 players I’ve had (Creative and Sandisk), I could mount them like a regular hard drive (sometimes, a little extra work was needed2 ). Mounted like that, moving music to the device was as simple as a copy/paste. No extra software. No additional services and drivers. And no troubleshooting. Just simple. But with iPods, they’re mostly proprietary. That’s great for the regular public. But not for folks like me. We like to take it apart and see how it works (right Dad?).
Doing this before with a WinAmp plugin, I knew it could be done quite easily. This Lifehacker post pointed me to Floola. It worked as expected, albeit slow. Next up, I replaced the battery. Now I can rock out without a power cable in tow. Things were good.
But then, sadly, it happened. The thing that most Mini owners are fully aware of: the drive died. Right there, midway through an update. All the tips and tricks I’ve learned throughout my short time with it had no effect. The Mini became a glorified paperweight.
Then one day, I ran across a post talking about how to replace the flaky MicroDrive with a CompactFlash card. After finally selling a few things on eBay, I picked up the card from TigerDirect. As my luck tends to be, it arrived shortly after we left for San Antonio.
So with sleep in my eyes, I replaced the drive at 415AM Thursday morning. After a quick charge, I used the iPod Updater that I’d been using (Old version).
Success! And, you’ll notice the capacity now. Feeling a bit daring, I decided to try to update iTunes from v6 to v7. I’ve tried it so many times before. Each time, the update would fail and iTunes would never see the Mini. So the update happens, iTunes starts up. I plug the Mini in, and cross my fingers.
Hooray! Take that, Mr. Mini! When I have time again, I’ll fiddle more with it. But for now, it’s playing tunes and holding a charge again.
We are the champions, rrring dingdingding
p.s. – I just found out the importance of normalizing the volume of your MP3s. Apparantly, the volume of the live version of “Wish” by NIN (off of the Beside You In Time DVD) is ALOT louder than the previous tracks. Nothing like damn near throwing your back out trying to get to the volume at work.
- I use Hack/Hacker here in the proper sense of the word. Not the bullshit you hear on CNN. [↩] [↩]
- On my Sandisk Sansa E240 v1, MSC mode was unavailable. By following the directions to downgrade the firmware to an earlier version, I got MCS mode back, which allowed the device to be seen in Windows Explorer. If you go this route and you brick your player, don’t blame me or ABI. [↩]