They say the best way to treat an iPod battery is to drain the battery once a month to give it a full charge. The improved battery life on my iPod Photo almost makes this difficult. I use it during the day but then I hook it up to my G5 in the evenings so I can listen to it some more. It charges when it’s hooked up my computer which means it almost constantly has a full charge. However I tried the procedure on Wednesday night. I let my iPod Photo play all night and all day, through to Thursday evening. I tried restarting the iPod a couple times too, to make sure it was truly powerless. And then I charged it back up again all Thursday night.It worked fine Friday, but out of the blue it started acting up today. During my commute today, I was listening to Thursday’s Randi Rhodes Show (yay! she’s back!), which I podcast from the Illegal Archives. I paused the player as I stopped at a gas station. When I was done filling up — at $2.19 a gallon! — I was caught offguard by my iPod’s refusal to wake up. It just sat there blank-faced, no matter what buttons I pressed.
When I got into work I was able to go online and remind myself how to “reset” my iPod (toggle the Hold switch and then press Menu + Select, together, for six to ten seconds). Fortunately, this worked…but I soon found that I had to repeat this procedure every single time I needed to wake my iPod back up.
This definitely did not seem right.
I grew more concerned when I got back home and saw iTunes would not recognize my iPod nor could I get the iPod mounted on my computer. It appeared the only way I fix this was to “restore” my iPod, which meant reinstalling the software — which meant wiping my thirty gigabytes of music and photos. At least I could still reset my iPod and get it back to life long enough to backup all my files. I used iPodRip for that. There are other programs which can do that, including freeware programs, but I didn’t know if I trusted them. iPodRip did a nice job of saving all my songs as well as my playlists…but a not-so-well job of noticing which songs I already still had on my computer. I spent the early evening weeding through duplicate tracks and duplicate albums; and I spent the rest of the evening loading my playlists and other albums back onto my iPod.
I guess everything is okay now. I already made sure, right off the bat, that my iPod could wake from sleep again. And I guess I’ve returned all my favorites albums back onto the iPod. But I’d still like to know what happened this morning to cause my player to wig out.
I’m pleased that I was able to keep all my songs and albums and playlists and artwork together. Nothing was lost and nothing was garbled. I was able to transplant all 31 GBs right back onto the iPod. I was also pleased I did not need to re-rip any CDs to fill any gaps in the collection. Still, this was another good reminder for me to backup my data. As well as to not do everything I’m told.
