Operation: Save iPood and Help Bob Get Their Tunes Back
Back in the last 2000's, I was gifted an incredible gift from my parents: an iPod Classic 160gb. This was a major upgrade from my iPod Mini 4gb (it was metallic green and totally badass). I was getting tired of having to rotate albums all the time, so the Classic let me store everything at once. 2000's me was definitely wowed by this, and actually, so is 2025 me.
I remember getting it loaded up and naming it iPood. Pretty funny stuff, Marc, you're definitely going places with that comedy level.
This thing has travelled far and wide with me: pretty much every trip I've done, it has been with me. It's still got the tooth marks from my pet rat, Tor, from back in my uni days around 2010, when my ex-girlfriend convinced me to get a rat because as a former owner of rats, she loved them to bits, so naturally I needed to get one too. That goober lived in my hood when I walked around, chewed all my cables, and seemingly my iPod too, and he was rather cute.
Around 2020, I put iPood into retirement and in December 2023, I picked up a Spotify subscription. In the last few months, however, I've grown so tired of being fed the same stale rotation of songs (not stale because of the artists, stale because Spotify's logic sucks), and I miss really thinking about what I wanted to listen to and it being a conscious decision of mine, not some algorithm. I cancelled Spotify a month or two ago and it's been real quiet since then. But then... I remembered iPood was in my drawer.
Cut to me frantically trying to find the charging cable (remember those old 30 pins?) and failing, succumbing to ordering one from Amazon after being given another free month of Prime and damnit if that shit doesn't work to get you buying up all manner of stuff before you cancel the free trial.
So I plug it in and wait. And wait. And wait a second it's on! Apple logo flashes, waaaaaiting, and then, oh no, what's this? "Use iTunes to Restore" flashes across the screen. This can't be good.
It seems that years of lying in a drawer potentially have done a number on it. But this is really not good, because I've got so many awesome old albums here that there's almost no way of finding again. Kaleidoscope by Opensouls! The Goose is Loose by Dub Dub Goose! Real niche shit that I'd be deeply sad to lose.
I don't hear any HDD sounds coming from it, so that's probably not good at all. What's stranger is that it seems I've opened iPood before, but I have no memory of this... Early Berlin really did a number on me. The sides of the casing are slightly bent, so it seems like I did at some point. Did I replace the HDD already with SD cards!? Turns out in 2017 I already did operation save iPood from a failing hard-drive.
I bust it open and upon getting inside, I find two SD cards. A chunky 64gb and a tiny 128gb. This 128gb is the issue. I can see that 96.76 GB are 'Unallocated', but that's not ideal, because even when trying to boot in Disk Mode, the SD card seems to just not realise at all that almost all my music is there. Fuck. Windows really wants me to reformat, but we're absolutely not going to do that.
In an effort to try and image the card, I loaded up DMDE and plugged in the SD card to see if that could help anything, but it kept kicking the SD card device off whenever I tried to make a full image of the Disk. Doctor, we're losing him! I can try to get Linux spun up and run ddrescue, but that is going to be a huge pain in the ass to get moving. But then I had an idea.
I am pretty good at keeping hard drives long after their use date, so I decided it was time to start hunting in my drawers to find my old hard drives. After a few minutes I find two drives: one that contains a almost nothing useful, and a second that looks familiar. I found some really old writings I'm super happy I saved. And I keep digging, finding artifacts of iTunes, and then... hold on... what the heck is this folder called PodTrans?!
There it is. All of it. 16,979 files. I swear I almost cry.
I immediately made a back up onto another drive and then decided it was time to start properly tagging all my music (essentially updating the metadata). I've long had a pretty messy collection and in my searching of how to recover my mp3s, I came across a program called mp3tag which is used to bulk update files, and boy howdy is that program awesome.
I'm just scrolling and scrolling, laughing at some super old tunes, playing some Afroman and chuckling away, when I came across an artist who for some reason really struck a chord with me. There's two albums, both well tagged, and I remember listening to them a lot many years ago. I have no clue how or when I got them, but something just clicks in that moment.
I won't say their name because they are just a private citizen these days it seems, so I'll refer to them as "Bob", but something compelled me to search for Bob on social media. I fire up Instagram, ignore the shitshow that's going on on my feed (I'm pretty much off social media at the moment and loving it), and search for Bob. Their real name is pretty unique and bam: first result.
I knew it was Bob because for some reason I can't remember, I seem know who they are and their profile is pretty arty, really historical, and a bit of a microcosm of their life over many, many years; lining up with my mental model of Bob and confirming my assumption of their identity. Seems Bob stopped posting awhile back, but I thought, "screw it, let's reach out and say thanks for the tunes".
So I write Bob:
Hey, you have no idea who I am, but today I recovered all my old music backups from like 2009 onwards, and there's two albums there from you: {Album 1} and {Album 2}. I just wanted to let you know that they're great! I have absolutely no memory of how I got these, but happy I did and happy I found them again. Thanks for making cool music 🙂
And a few days later, Bob responds.
I won't share exactly what Bob says as they don't know about this blog and I never got permission to share our messages, but essentially Bob is amazed that anyone even has these as hardly anyone knew they existed, and what's even crazier is that Bob isn't even sure if they have copies anymore! So Bob asks me if I can email them over. Well, Bob, I'd be absolutely delighted to!
I zip 'em up and ship 'em off. Bob writes back a few days later and thanks me for sharing "such forgotten memories." My pleasure, Bob.
I'm now enjoying my mostly cleaned up library and somehow found even more music I forgot I had. I guess it was all just missing key metadata and I never saw it. Almost 17,000 songs is a lot after all. I still haven't got iPood working again as it'll need a new SD card, but for now I'm just happy I got my music back.
All this started because I missed being able to choose what I hear. It's the same reason I like going to the shops instead of asking someone to drop off groceries: I want to select, discern which of the options is best, literally feel what I'm putting in my basket, and I'm ok with taking the time to do this. It's the same with music and I'm was feeling more and more that I was submitting my agency to the cheapest service possible in order to become ever more passive.
I'm going to avoid turning this into a sermon; it's not, it's just my reflection on how I managed to get my music back, how some long-dormant memory prompted me to reach out to Bob, how Bob got their music back, and how I realised that I don't want to give up my choice again in this matter; meaningless as it may be in the overall scheme of things.
Sometimes digging up old memories is worth a whole lot.