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iTunes for Windows Breaking Older iPods

evil_liam asks: "In our office we've been running an older 5gb iPod with both Macs and PC's (using Xplay), but when we installed iTunes for the PC the iPod stopped working. Songs and playlists transfer over fine, and you can see them and play them in iTunes, but you can't listen to them on the iPod, itself. It shows the song details and so forth, but skips through the tracks, playing 0 seconds of each one until it finishes. This only applies to tracks added since iTunes was installed. No amount of reformatting, or rolling back firmware seems to work. When I called Apple, they stated that they simply don't support the use of the older Mac iPods on PC's and are not responsible, even though they admit that it was their own software that caused this. We're not alone, see this thread at Apple. I'm not quite suggesting that this was deliberate, but they are aware of it and don't seem to care." Does anyone have ideas on possible fixes for the afflicted iPods?

7 of 683 comments (clear)

  1. Before you rush to blame Apple. by Raven42rac · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What part of "not supported" was not understood? I am sure that Apple will do something to rectify the situation. Hope they had a backup of their music. Wait a second, a MAC-only 5GB IPOD? Not a "Mac-only unless running iTunes on a PC running Windows, then it is ok" iPod. Why does it not surprise me that running a first-generation Mac-only IPOD on a Windows machine causes problems? Maybe the part about it being "mac-only", and "not supported on PC", as well as being "mac-only". (The repition was purely intentional). This seems to be the user's fault, not Apple's. So if I put a BMW dashboard into a VW, will I be able to get mad when it does not work. All I am saying is do not rush to blame Apple on this one, this seems to be a PICNIC issue to me.

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  2. Deliberate ? by tmark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not quite suggesting that this was deliberate

    Well, the breaking may not have been deliberate, but their refusal to support their customers is most certainly deliberate . And is it more than a coincidence that fixing this problem isn't going to sell many more iPods, is it ?

  3. Maybe you should check with XPlay by finelinebob · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you're using XPlay to operate your iPod in a manner that Apple says it doesn't support in the first place, why are you griping about/to Apple?

  4. Why the hell are FSs incompatible anyway? by cryptochrome · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Would somebody please tell me why they can't make a filesystem (or filesystem family) that preserves the basic functionality common to all filesystems but supports all the bells and whistles (resource forks, metainfo, etc.) needed to keep the various operating systems happy and can therefore be used with multiple machines with different OSs without jumping through hoops? I'm not saying every machine should use the same FS, I'm just saying there should be a basic standard that allows full functionality for any one OS and basic functionality for any given OS. And if there is one, why isn't anyone using it? It's not like this is an unusual issue - (CD/DVD)(+/-)(RW)s, floppy/zip disks, and portable drives of all kinds have had this problem for as long as I can remember. Why should finding/reading/writing/indexing a string of bits or grouping a bunch of files in a heirarchy readable to any machine be so troublesome?

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  5. Re:Sigh by benjymous · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's something I've been wondering

    When you install Windows iTunes it installs a background service for running the iPod, which sits there, using up memory and cpu time looking to see if you've got an iPod plugged in

    What's the need of this for all the people who installed iTunes, but don't own an iPod? Surely there should be a seperate iPod service install (or install option in iTunes) that you run if you actually have an iPod

    I disabled the service and it hasn't had any obvious effect on the operation of iTunes

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  6. Re:Apple always said... by Gizzmonic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually you're wrong, Sony's older laptops have i.Link ports that are capped at 200Mbps per second and only work with DV cameras. Imagine my surprise when I tried to get my external FW DVD-R to work with one...

    Leave it to Sony to bring "standard" interfaces into goofy, needlessly proprietary crap!

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  7. Re:Apple approved fix by Lodragandraoidh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There was no 'first' computer - there were actually two identical computers built at the same time during the second world war - the Colossus electronic cryptanalytic machine - used to break the Enigma code used by the Germans - both machines destroyed shortly after the war, under orders from Winston Churchhill to break it up into pieces "not larger than a man's fist". Since they were Top Secret devices, and not disclosed to the public until the 1970s, the British did not get credit for building the first computer.

    The Germans also had a device that was very close to being a computer, but did not store its programs - more akin to a Babbage difference engine without conditional branching - built in 1937 by Konrad Zuse. It used Binary arithmetic - an interesting advance for its time; Zuse calculaters were used in the engineering of the V2 rocket.

    The computers built after that were one of a kind - there was no 'standard hardware' or 'standard software' floating around from different vendors.

    Back in the days of the Dinosaurs, Real Programmers built the first operating systems for the new beasties - and generally ended up rewriting their creations when hardware became obsolete and new equipment entered the data centre. Not until the introduction of the mini-computer did standardization, interoperability and portability start to show up on the radar screen (circa 1960s).

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    Lodragan Draoidh
    The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain