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?

Comments

Before you rush to blame Apple.

[Raven42rac]

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.

Re:Apple approved fix

[Lodragandraoidh]

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).