iPod Classic has been discontinued

johnnywayback · Sep 12, 2014

I just grabbed the last one from a Radio Shack in Washington, D.C.

PedroSpecialK · Sep 12, 2014

Sad day- a 160 GB classic has been keeping me going for 5 years.

mikeford · Sep 12, 2014

Glad I have a 160gig I bought last year that I haven't opened yet cuz my 80 gig is still chugging along nearly a decade after I bought it.

This is what happens when people who don't like music get to take over and dictate the market. I have more music than will fit on the 160, let alone a 64 gig ipod touch.

plus the ability to turn the volume down or skip songs without taking the thing out of your pocket is impossible for me to consider living without.

johnmd20 · Sep 12, 2014

HriniakPosterChild said:
Apple has (without fanfare) discontinued the iPod Classic. This is a problem for me, since I own more music than will fit on a 64GB iPod Touch, and I like to have my whole library with me in my car.

Amazon has stock only from third party sellers. Target.com and WalMart.com no longer have any for delivery, but some stores still have a few for pickup.

I just bought one from a local Target to have for a backup. If you think you might need one, start looking now. When the stock in stores is gone, there will be nothing but refurbs available.

I would assume when the next iTouch comes out, it might have a maximum of 128GB's. Still, that just means you have to buy another thing from Apple. Which is their strategy.

rodderick · Sep 12, 2014

Sansa Clip + 128 GB SD card is a reasonably cheap solution.

SumnerH · Sep 12, 2014

Except that my car has an iPod interface (not a generic MP3 player interface), so 95% of my music is in m4a format.

Most non-Apple players will play mp3, m4a, flac, wav, and ogg at a minimum. I can't speak for the sansa itself, but those formats are the bare minimum for players I'd purchase.

bohous · Sep 13, 2014

rodderick said:
Sansa Clip + 128 GB SD card is a reasonably cheap solution.

I'm pretty sure the max for the Clip is 32gb

Red Sox Physicist · Sep 13, 2014

The Sansa Clip Zip does m4a (it lists AAC support). I have one. It does only take microSDHC cards which means a max of 32GiB per card.

SumnerH · Sep 13, 2014

Red Sox Physicist said:
The Sansa Clip Zip does m4a (it lists AAC support). I have one. It does only take microSDHC cards which means a max of 32GiB per card.

It supports 128GB with rockbox. I suspect they'll work with the stock firmware too (as long as you reformat to FAT32--SDXC uses exFAT, but many SDHC devices will support larger cards if they're FAT32 formatted), but that has an 8000 song limit and is hellaciously slow on large libraries so you'd probably want rockbox anyway if you're using a huge library.

Murderer's Crow · Sep 14, 2014

I don't see why switching to a 128gb iPhone or Android w/ that kind of capacity is such a problem. The devices that do this are still out there. There is practically no reason for apple to continue selling the device.

Also, iTunes match is a godsend for me.

saintnick912 · Sep 15, 2014

Buy two or three on closeout and learn how to swap the battery, you will probably be able to keep one running until the storage question is a funny "remember when we thought 128gb was a lot" historical footnote.

Pretty sure my circa 2007 model would still run if I cared to try. But I just usually keep a few GB on my phone for the commute and stream at home and work, less stressful.

AlNipper49 · Sep 15, 2014

Why don't you just use Spotify?

AlNipper49 · Sep 15, 2014

You can do syncs, or use something like Google Music.

SumnerH · Sep 16, 2014

AlNipper49 said:
Why don't you just use Spotify?

It doesn't have my files. Some songs it lacks entirely. Some it will never have, because they're things I recorded myself. Some songs are present but in shitty forms (e.g. almost everything from Universal has distracting audible watermarks).
It requires streaming, which is a no-go in a lot of scenarios (e.g. on a plane, on the metro), and sucks even when it's possible (it burns battery much faster than playing local music).
I've spent a lot of time developing playlists, song ratings, genre coding and stuff that I sync around to all my devices, I don't want to have to replicate those on spotify or whatever.
I want control over my media, once I buy it, not to be beholden to someone else to take it away or downgrade it on a whim (witness everything from Kindle's Orwell incident to Netflix dropping shows and movies).

AlNipper49 · Sep 16, 2014

Yeah but for 9 bucks just use both. You're already previously capped by an artificial cap (128) so it should be easy to throttle back to 64gb of the 'essentials'.

I have over a TB of music (lossless) and I've never had a problem finding something to listen to. In fact I probably listen to more because the universe of music that is immediately available to me has expanded.

You also don't need to stream, just pick a bunch of playlists to sync to your device. I have like 20 GB right now and its so much that I forget to freshen up the list.

I still have my essentials local to my phone too. Plus if you've spent a lot of time developing playlists in the iTunes ecosystem then you're already beholden to one master. Just export the playlists using Ivy or something and import them into Spotify. It takes like three seconds.

AlNipper49 · Sep 16, 2014

I have 1TB of music. Are you saying that I would enjoy it more if I could 1. But a 1tb device and 2. Be willing to pay the significant premium.

My point is what's the utility in carrying around music that you'll never ever listen to?

SumnerH · Sep 16, 2014

AlNipper49 said:
I have 1TB of music. Are you saying that I would enjoy it more if I could 1. But a 1tb device and 2. Be willing to pay the significant premium.

My point is what's the utility in carrying around music that you'll never ever listen to?

Partially because I never know what I'll want to pull out at any given moment; I can be having a conversation with my brother and a particular topic comes up that reminds me of a song in my collection. It might not be my favorite song, or one I'd planned on listening to, but having it available is nice. And if I can just sync my whole library, then I don't need to spend any time thinking about what to bring today or when to cycle it; it's worth a bit of money to never worry about sorting through it again. Also, I don't want _just_ music, I'll hop the train up to Boston and want a few hours of TV/movies for the ride up and back on top of my normal allotment of downloaded podcasts and music and everything else.

More to the point, storage is so cheap that it's ludicrous that modern phones don't at least have 128GB of it--I had 80GB on my mp3 player before the ipod first came out. It's a decade later and most phones still have less?

AlNipper49 · Sep 16, 2014

That much I'm with you on. Phones are like the anti-Moores Law.

If Windows phones want to make a splash, take a hit to the dick and offer a 256G model. You need to splash if you want to steal market.

At the time 1G quotas were considered revolutionary for gmail. (I forget exactly how much it was but you get the point)

AlNipper49 · Sep 16, 2014

I listen to it all. It takes me like 30 seconds to sync (and can do remotely if I absolutely must). I just leave the house with about 1000 hours of music and the ability to stream about 100,000,000 hours of music if my fancy is touched.

Brohamer of the Gods · Sep 17, 2014

An unlikely source for used I Pods is Gamestop. I bought one there on line a few months ago, though a check shows the prices have gone up since then.

Bosoxen · Sep 19, 2014

AlNipper49 said:
You can do syncs, or use something like Google Music.

This may be off topic, but how do you get around Apple's DRM shit? I've been trying to move all of my music from iTunes to Google, but I'm running into that firewall. I see now that Apple has since discontinued that BS, but the only free method I see that will work to remove it is if the music is in the Apple cloud. My problem is that my music is all local, meaning that it's locked down tighter than a virgin's ass. The only option I've seen that will work for me is to pay $60 for software that will unlock it. But fuck that, I've already spent the money to buy that music, I don't see why I should have to spend money to port music that I rightfully own just because of some archaic "won't you think of the millionaire musicians" crap.

I suppose that's what I get for falling into the Apple trap to begin with, but that 20GB iPod with the entire U2 collection was a pretty sweet deal in 2004 (yeah, that's how long it's been since I freed myself from the shackles of Apple, or so I thought). Now that music is totally useless to me, since the iPod died years ago and I'm not buying another one.

AlNipper49 · Sep 19, 2014

Spend the $60 and proudly consider it a fuck you to Apple.

Bosoxen · Sep 19, 2014

Well, a bigger fuck you would be if they offered that software themselves and I bought it from a competitor.

But damn it, that's not what I wanted to hear.

derekson · Sep 19, 2014

If you bought the music from iTunes can't you just download new DRM free copies from within iTunes and then use those copies for whatever you like?

Bosoxen · Sep 19, 2014

That's what I was referring to about downloading it from the cloud. Somehow, I'm not sure how, I ended up with only the local copies of the song files, so I can't simply download them again. That's why I'm in this pickle.

SumnerH · Sep 19, 2014

Yes, and http://digiex.net/downloads/download-center-2-0/applications/11796-requiem-4-1-remove-itunes-drm-fairplay-music-video-books.html

Downloading fresh copies in a non-DRM format is the best approach.

Bosoxen · Sep 19, 2014

I tried Requiem this morning. My fault, forgot to mention that. It appears to no longer be supported, however, so it wasn't compatible with the latest version of iTunes. I did just have a lightbulb go off (I tried this at 3:30 am, so I wasn't exactly the most clear-headed). I can simply try to install an earlier version of iTunes - probably easier said than done - which would be compatible with Requiem. I'll try that tonight.

Thanks, all!

JerBear · Sep 19, 2014

You used to be able to convert the protected files (m4p) to mp3 within iTunes and the converted file dropped the DRM. Not sure if this still works.

AlNipper49 · Sep 19, 2014

Time to get a stealin'!

Bosoxen · Sep 19, 2014

JerBear said:
You used to be able to convert the protected files (m4p) to mp3 within iTunes and the converted file dropped the DRM. Not sure if this still works.

There is the option to convert to MP3, but it's blocked by the lock on the file. So it's the same issue there.

Looks like I may have to purchase that software. I have a poker night with some work buddies next Friday. The proceeds from winning that will go to rescuing my music from the clutches of that fascist organization known as Apple.

Bosoxen · Sep 24, 2014

Requiem didn't end up working, for various reasons, but I did find a good solution. It's called TuneBite. The basic version - which is all you'd need - costs $25 and does full conversion of all media. I can verify that it does work, as I am now uploading my formerly locked down music to Google.

Just wanted to share in case anyone else needed a solution to the problem.

iPod Classic has been discontinued

Member

Member

Comes at you like a tornado of hair and the NHL sa

woolwich!

mad dog

Member

Member

Member

Malt Liquor Picker

Member

Member

Well-Known Member

Malt Liquor Picker

Dragon Wangler 216

Member

GINO!

Huge Member

Member

Member

Huge Member

Member

Malt Liquor Picker

Huge Member

Member

Huge Member

Malt Liquor Picker

Huge Member

Member

Huge Member

Well-Known Member

Bounced back

Huge Member

Bounced back

Member

Bounced back

Malt Liquor Picker

Bounced back

Member

Huge Member

Bounced back

Bounced back