Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Irony of ironies; all is irony...

   I've never been an iPod person. Heck, I've been around long enough to remember when 'Walkmans' were new and cool. I've never been a Walkman person either. I don't really like listening to music on headphones to start with, and when you make them those crappy little headphones that come with personal music players of whatever description, well, count me out. I'll just go downstairs and fire up the stereo, OK? Let me know if it's too loud.
   Still, I'm not one to reject something out of hand, either. So, when Matthew got his new super-giga-iPod-nano-electro-fantabulism-player last year, and generously gave me his old one to use, I didn't scoff. I just put it on the shelf of my armoire, and let it sit until it spoke to me.
   We have iTunes on our computer, because Matthew has had iPods for a couple of years. I haven't felt any need to put any of my CDs on it. I wasn't using an iPod, and I don't listen to music on the computer, so what was the use? Matthew had copied several of my albums for him to listen to, but beyond AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, the computer was pretty much an exclusive Three Days Grace - Rise Against - Billy Tallent zone.

   And then I got a new car stereo.

   My old one had become just a radio, after the CD player stopped working. I lived with it for a long time, but an opportunity came up to grab a new CD player a an absolute steal, so I took advantage. I got one that had a jack on the front that would allow an iPod to be plugged in. And whaddaya know, but I had an iPod sitting, unused, in my bedroom armoire. Cool!
   I took it out, hooked it up to the computer, clicked on 'random autofill' and loaded it up. It held about 120 songs, or so. I took it out to my car, plugged it in, and enjoyed. I could drive for hours and hours, and never hear the same song twice. And no talking, or commercials. I was a convert. I came home and started loading CDs onto my version of iTunes. I also copied Matthew's music library for my use as well. There were a few CDs I skipped, but not many. Over two or three days, I went through my record collection from A up to E. The last CD in the "E" category was Europe - The Final Countdown (shut up), and when I had finished uploading that one, i had exactly...

3000songs

...on iTunes. And that only represented about one third of my Cds. I had a long way to go, but I had made a good start.

   Excited, I brought the iPod in from the car in order to reload it from my new, expanded selection of music, but when I plugged it in, I got an error message saying it was corrupted, and that I should reformat it by clicking on the 'restore' button.

   So I clicked on the restore button.

   It fitzed and fiddled around for several minutes, and then said this:

UnknownError

   I broke my iPod. :(


Update: A little bit of Google-Fu led me to this: iPod reset utility for Windows. Fixed it up in a snap. I'm rockin' again.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bummer.

Most iPods weren't made for people who actually, you know, LIKE music and want to cram a lot of their collections on it.  I think there's probably a good chance that putting more than a few hundred songs on the gizmo probably confused the hell out of it.  

Anonymous said...

What I liked most about this post is that I had to restrain myself MIGHTY hard from clicking on the OK button on your error box.  My brain knew that it was a picture from a screen capture, but my instinct nearly drove me to push the button.

Must...

Make everything...

OK again!!


Simon (I think I'm better now.)

Anonymous said...

Aw. How 'bout a cookie instead?
http://www.2writehands.com

Anonymous said...

It has taken me a couple years to put 2,383 songs on my iPod and you had the patience to load up 3,000 all at once. Impressive. --Cin

Anonymous said...

Fill your world with music...looks like you did. 3,000 is quite impressive but watch out for damage to your hearing....take care, Sandi

Anonymous said...

I am hooked too!!!  I never wanted one until the kids got theirs for Christmas... then now I am lovin' it!!!  lol Glad you fixed it... enjoy!!!!  

be well,
Dawn

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you are fixed!  If your CD player will support mp3 format like Bubba's does, you can also burn your own CD's that hold one heck of a lot.  ;0)  -  Barbara