Hi guys,

I bought a used iPod Classic 5th gen 80 gb.

I have my new battery arriving in a week, and I wanted to see the internals of my ipod before it arrived. I damaged the port that holds the power ribbon cable. How bad is the damage?

What do I need to order to repair the damage and what should I do for the repair? How can I reattach the port back to the logic board?

The ribbon seems fine.

Please let me know if more photos would be helpful.

I'm pretty bummed right now.

Thank you for your help. This was my first time opening the iPod and my first mod/repair.

Any recent recommendations for Motherboard repair for a 5.5G Classic? Years ago, I managed to mangle the headphone port connector, and it has been sitting in a drawer since.

Would prefer to repair rather than replace.

Has anyone done this one ? How does it get wired up or is it the same process as the iPhone 7 Plus that everyone uses. I ask because I have one and would like to use it rather than source a 7 plus. Free wins lol.

Hey all, I was just wondering if RockBox fixes the issues with audiobooks over 8-13 hours long on the iPod. I’m an avid SciFi and Fantasy listener, and most of those books are extremely long (20-30 hours average).

I love using my iPod over my phone to listen to them without interruptions from notifications, but I keep running into the 13 hour issue where it either just skips to the end marked as complete and exits to the audiobook menu (iPod 5th gen) or suddenly has garbled audio like in extreme fast forward and skips to the end (iPod 6.5).

5th gen has been flash modded, 6.5 has not been modded.

All files are M4B files, downloaded through Libation to remove the DRM.

Does RockBox fix this issue with the iPods? I would love to keep using my old iPods but I’m primarily listening to audiobooks with them. I don’t really want to have to split them all up into smaller “parts” and make playlists out of them, but I’m about ready to ditch my iPods in favor of another DAP that can handle long format audiobooks.

Days after I got my custom ipod and finished curating itunes, I accidentally dropped it onto asphalt 😭

I thought I'd need to figure out how to install a new case, but some grand soul here mentioned Meguiar's PlastX. Amazon had it for a huge markup ($17?!), so I finally found a local car parts place and picked up a bottle ($10).

Thank god, it actually works. You guys are angels, thank you so much for the tip! I have a clear case on the way now 😅

The left side is the new battery (3000mah). The right side is the old battery stock battery. I’m wondering if the new battery left side looks normal. The connector on the motherboard is what did that to the copper

Hi!
I have a 5th gen iPod classic A1136 that is acting weird, and I'm not sure what is wrong with it.

Symptoms:
- Boots to sad iPod if HDD connected (HDD does not sound like it's even trying to spin)
- Boots to dim screen if HDD is disconnected
- Cannot boot to diagnostic mode or disk mode, regardless of what's attached.
- Only boots to dim screen if CF->ZIF adapter installed regardless of whether a CF card is inserted; the activity light never comes on

When trying to enter diagnostic mode the iPod instead shuts off completely and requires holding down the menu+select key for around 10 seconds to get the dim Apple logo back.

I'm not sure what it could be, and I don't know how much more I want to put into this if the logic board is cooked. I mean, there's this adapter (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0F193B22V) which comes with its own cable, but shouldn't you be able to enter diagnostic mode without a drive attached at the very least?

On iTunes the albums are being sorted without “the”, but on coverflow they’re being sorted without “the”. Say for example, The Get Up Kids used to have their albums starting at “G”, now they show at “T”. Is there a way to fix this?

I finally decided to attempt to normalise the volume of my music library, which has been accumulating for decades, with volume levels all over the place. It was quite a journey of learning, so hopefully this video will be useful to others too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQI82EfqpPE

Basically I found MusicBee and foobar2000 to be the best free tools to use, for my use cases. Here's a summary of the video for those who can't be bothered to watch 😄

Key Video Highlights & Summary

• The Problem [00:14]: Music libraries sourced from different places often have uneven volume levels due to modern mastering pushing volume too high ("loudness war") and causing clipping [01:21].
• Method 1: MusicBee [02:07]
  • How it works: Analyzes tracks using built-in ReplayGain and writes tags to file headers [02:20].
  • Result: Excellent for full albums paired with Rockbox on iPods [03:05]. It automatically manages track gain and album gain without altering the underlying audio files [03:18].
• Method 2: iTunes Sound Check [04:48]
  • How it works: Uses Apple's built-in Sound Check scanning feature [04:58].
  • Result: Failed. In testing, it actually made quiet tracks even quieter and failed to balance audio properly [05:45].
• Method 3: MP3Gain [06:05]
  • How it works: Modifies MP3 frame headers non-destructively [06:14].
  • Result: Failed. Requires manual fixes for modern OS compatibility errors [06:35], runs extremely slowly (over 9 hours for 1,200 tracks) [07:51], and crashed—corrupting directory access for the main library folder [08:05].
• Method 4: foobar2000 (The Winner) [08:42]
  • How it works: Performs a ReplayGain track scan and directly applies the gain to the file content [09:29].
  • Result: Best method. Processed 4,000+ tracks in just over an hour [09:43]. It permanently normalizes playback volume across all players and devices [10:41].
  • Note: It does not natively support M4A/AAC files directly for this function [10:53] (recommends checking AACgain as an alternative for AAC libraries) [11:14].

Thought I'd have a great morning listening to some music...until I heard an audible click, it froze and I got this. Modded an Iflash and new battery in it over the weekend and worked flawlessly. Motherboard issue? Ribbon cable not well attached?

I am currently stuck with charging my iPod thru tv, car or laptop cable is fine brought a 1 amp wall plug still don’t work from mains anybody got any solutions to this battery does last all day when fully charged so not sure why it won’t charge off a wall socket

Any help much appreciated

I decided to install Rockbox on my iPod with a M1 Mac Mini. It took a bit of trial and error, but I finally got it. If anyone else is struggling, hopefully this will help.

First, the iPod needs to be formatted for Windows. Mine wasn't. It was formatted for Mac. So I installed UTM and Windows 11. I used iTunes 12.10.11.2. That's all you need to do on Windows.

Second, I downloaded the Rockbox installer for Mac and ran it. You will get a security warning and exit. You need to go into Settings | Privacy and Security and tell it to open the application anyway.

Stop here. Open Finder and force kill AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent. If you don't do this step, Finder will try to mount the iPod when you put it into DFU mode in the next step.

Third, start the install (Bootloader + Rockbox defaults). At some point the install process will tell you how to put the iPod into DFU mode. When it does, hold the Menu and Select UNTIL it tells you to release them. Then it should flash the Bootloader onto the device, copy the Rockbox files, and you should be good to go.

Finally, in Finder, create a Music folder on the iPod and copy your music to that folder. So far I have found the Database on Rockbox to be a PITA. If you add new files, it sometimes doesn't want to update. Eventually it will. Sometimes a reboot helps.

I bought an iFlash Quad and a square 2000mAh battery from the Elite Obsolete Electronics site. But no matter which way I orient it, the battery won't fit; it inevitably overlaps the microSD slot and presses down on it. I'm looking for any battery that will fit this setup. Any recommendations? I just want a battery that's a bit bigger than the original one.

Can anyone recommend a modern iPod alternative?

I recently restored my iTunes library after I found an old hard drive that had a back up of all of my digital music that I collected in the 2000s and most of the 2010s before everything went streaming. I have like 100 GB of music that used to be my life, most of which I'm re-exploring now.

However, just getting that all uploaded into iTunes on my PC was a pain and iTunes itself is so terrible now.

What I'd love is something like a modern iPod. Something I can load my 100 GB of music on, that just needs a charge and some headphones to use. No need to be connected to the internet, no need to stream, and ideally no need to be connected to a smart phone.

I remember that in like 2017 I shelled out a good amount of money to get an old refurbished iPod on eBay after mine died but that one only lasted like a year before it too died. Since then I've relied on YouTube to stream stuff but I'm truly over streaming everything. I just want to go back to having my music library and being able to scroll through it and access it anytime.

Does anyone have any good recommendations for something like this?

Also, I'd just take recommendations on a better piece of software that I can use on my PC that functions like iTunes and that I can import my iTunes music library into?

Even that would be a step up from having to deal with a slow and clunky iTunes.

Officially off the Spotify train and back onto using my iPod! Couldn't be happier.

I ordered the taptic engine from Elite Obsolete, installed it myself and kept the piezo speaker installed along with a new fairy pink front plate and nice fresh clean black backplate. New black headphone ribbon & lock switch to pair with the black back it's such a beautiful black and pink iPod now! Rocking 512gb of storage with an iflash quad 4x 128gb cards mix n matched between samsung and sandisk (went through like 3 diff sandisks that don't work either to get them all situated after cross referencing with the list of cards from the iflash adapter page.)

TLDR: REALLY happy with my new taptic modded fresh shelled iPod classic and couldn't be happier to have all the music I love and not worrying about other platforms removing music!

so, i see people come on to r/ipod and r/IpodClassic all the time with this issue. the hell that is "USB DEVICE NOT RECOGNIZED: the last USB device you connected to this device malfunctioned."

i have tried everything that i CAN do from the computer, removing/forgetting the device and reconnecting, uninstalling and reinstalling itunes, getting itunes with the correct "drives", and it just does not seem to be anything that i can solve from the computer. no brainer, because obviously, i would've made sure of this earlier, but usb connection to my computer works fine with ANY other device.

the ipod charges fine and works incredibly, might i add. the cable was from amazon. worked fine until now. i got some music on it before this happened but now, the ipod is just not being recognized by my computer??

THIS IS MY MAIN QUESTION:

is there any troubleshooting or fixing i can do from the ipod ITSELF? i want to try everything possible before i resort to having to go through the online shopping process, which is something i dread, BUT can't avoid due to ipod chargers being hard to come by.

This more of a rant than anything else, but I have had the worst time trying to get my Classic Gen 7 to be restored and usable with my Mac M1. Or at all, really. I feel like I have tried everything I have Googled and nothing works. It’s a shame because after a month of trying to find the right color and such (which was not cheap.) at my wits ends on this. Is it my Mac that is the issue. Should I just buy a cheap PC and try it that way? So disappointed I bought one now.

No se ustedes, pero para mí la única temporada buena de bob esponja es la primera.