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karaoke night

OK, followers of All Things Omega. This one’s going to get technical.

It was during the Stony Brook era when I heard about the iPod. A former friend of the campus radio station who worked in Apple made it happen, and a few days later it found itself in my hands: the 5th-generatrion 30GB iPod Classic, personally engraved right on its shiny silver backing.

My iPod Classic was the unanimous winner, and Whitehouse, Boards Of Canada, and Vincent Gallo were the first artists who christened the new iPod. It came with me on a train to Penn Station. That Spring day, I’d met up with a potential who came with me to the Brooklyn Museum. It stands as one of my all-time favorite memories of going to New York City, and one of my all-time favorite memories of her.

The sound quality was clearer, the form factor was smaller, and took the work out of switching out cassettes or discs that skipped. The listening experience was less archaic and cumbersome. The idea of storing lots of music with no technical limitations or regard to digital rights management (DRM) was what had me sold on the Classic. I knew I could do a lot with it. Both my Walkman and Discman were forced into involuntarily retirement. Such as life.

It wasn’t only train rides. My iPod Classic went with me everywhere I went: the campus gym, laundromats, and in car rides connected via a cassette adapter. Everything went well until all 30GB of capacity was full. It only took nine months to do so. The fun was over, but not for long. That’s when I learned about file types and bitrates; the measure of clarity of how an MP3, M4A, FLAC, WAV, and AAC sounds against each other. The higher the bitrate, the larger the file but better the quality.

But, I wasn’t concerned about quality. That was a given. I wanted quantity. Many high bitrate songs ate up a lot of space when I thought it shouldn’t have. I changed my settings in iTunes for all incoming music to be converted to 128Kbps through its MP3 encoder. I re-up’d everything and 2,000 songs would later become 4,500+. Now, I know you’ll be asking: “why didn’t you get the 80GB Classic?” Because I was new to digital music players and wasn’t privy to the value of larger storage options. Is that a good enough answer for you?

It took me five years to max-out my storage before moving on to something bigger. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, so I went the full 100 yards. Welcome to the 7th-generation 160GB Classic. (In reality, it’s 149GB considering the operating system and measurement systems.) It was the greatest that Apple would make - and their last. I got it used (and in black) at a video-game store for $170.00; less than what I paid for the previous one. Validation achieved. (Are you all happy now?) Nothing had changed except for a greater consolidation of storage. That was a good thing, because I was about to re-join the campus radio station and begin Omega WUSB.

I visited the Apple Store where I got help. A legendary feat if you ever accomplished it. I was looking to transfer all of my music from the old iPod to the new one, and not having to re-up everything by scratch. One of their Geniuses taught me a tricky way to directly access the iPod’s storage by unlocking a hidden folder that held all of its contents.

I uncovered it in Windows 10, where inside of it were all my MP3s divided by 50 more folders (labeled FXX), classified by overall song length. Save for about 20 songs which were thought to be unidentifiable, all 4,500+ songs were easily imported to the new 160GB with no problem. Most of the metadata (artist, song titles, and album information) stayed intact. Mission succeeded. I learned to make numerous iTunes playlists which, from that point on, made me ultimately stop burning mix discs but still continuing the tradition of seasonal mixtapes. A new master playlist allowed me to audition all of my music finds for Omega WUSB during more train rides and road trips via auxiliary port. I will say that my 160GB Classic has been nothing but good to me.

The cycle continued. Six years forward, and my 7th-generation iPod was 5GB short of reaching full capacity at 36,000+ songs. I had to get a new smartphone, so I contemplated getting a high-capacity model: an iPhone XS, XS Max, or the XR. I wasn’t willing to throw away $1,100.00 for a 512GB-something that could get easily jacked, so I settled for the 32GB iPhone SE. Now you’re asking: “why did you downgrade?” Well, hold on. Give me a chance to explain!

I was deep into retail at my then-current location. I did my research and finally made my decision. I’m going for a new iPad. I didn’t need a Macbook as it had lesser storage for the price. Apple just released their 3rd-generation iPad Pros with a maximum capacity of 2TB for $1,900.00. No, thank you. Apple doesn’t need my money that badly, so I chose the 10.5” 2nd-generation 512GB (479GB) iPad Pro. My location wanted $1,000.00 for it, but I price-matched against B&H down to $700.00 and bought an Otterbox case and Applecare+ with it (take no chances!), pocketing an extra $100.00. My card cushioned the cost by giving me 18 months to pay it off. Merry Christmas to me.

**********

This is where my Apple experience changes.

My 160GB Classic stored 36,000 songs at last count. My new iPad Pro would take all of it and fill it at 33% capacity. I accessed the iPod’s hidden folder and threw everything into iTunes. It took a few hours to upload the first major batch of music. It’s finally done, and…much of my metadata (artist, title, album) is missing in iTunes.

For several days I looked up how to salvage and recover all that information in transit. I even called Apple tech support and stayed on the line for two hours for solutions. All I got was an Apple representative who asked me “how do you happen to have all this music in your iPad?!” in such a shocking manner. Thanks for your help.

I found the answer myself instead. All changes made in iTunes sync to the folder directly so that my MP3s information would leave the same. Not with my iPad. I tried to find a hidden folder for it, but there was no such thing. That meant being forced to change the MP3’s metadata through Windows 10 / 11 by right-clicking ‘preferences’, updating its details, and hitting ‘apply’ on each one before transferring inbound. That’s how it all registers. At that point, I took out all MP3s from the FXX folders and consolidated into one new folder. I’d make the changes there and backing them up, because I’m not doing it again in the future.

Then I found some unidentified MP3s file-named by a four-character code (ex. “HRGW”). Those were songs with no artist and song information and didn’t get an artist folder when imported / exported. Great. I had to line up my iTunes and newly-created MP3 folder side-by-side and matched everything up according to length (time). Many songs shared the same length, so imagine bouncing back-and-forth and playing them against each other to verify which was which.

But, that’s not all. I attempted to sync my entire music library from my iPad’s through iTunes to another outgoing folder in Windows. That didn’t happen. After many attempts and folder assignments, no duplicates of my entire library could be made. Jesus tap-dancing smiling Christ on Broadway, what is going on? I used to do everything on both my iPod Classics, so why not on my new iPad?

I also noticed another thing iTunes showed me: my uploads weren’t converting correctly. I still continued the practice of down-converting my MP3s from 320Kbps to 128Kbps. I went to ‘general preferences’, then ‘import settings’, and set the MP3 encoder to do just that. I threw in some more high-quality sounds in hope that it would do it. Nope, it didn’t [cue Family Feud strikes]. Luckily, I used a Roxio converter to do that for me. That took another few hours on an Asus all-in-one PC running on a dual-core (!) Intel 5th-generation i5 processor and 8GB of RM.

Hey! How can we make this even more difficult? By botching up iTunes, of course! My iPod would always connect to my Windows 10 PC and play through with no issues. Not my iPad Pro. It froze every time I pressed play. I had to do a special procedure through its display in quick fashion in order to prevent it from locking up.

Sigh…

**********

Somewhere between my last iPod Classic and iPad Pro was when Apple flipped its DRM policies. The fact that I was diagnosed with o.c.d. made the ritual of labeling MP3s and using iTunes a fucking nightmare. I went to the Apple Store for answers that the Geniuses didn’t have. I called Apple assistance, where they remote-accessed my tablet for two hours on to see if my iPad could do all my iPod did. You can imagine how shocked that female Apple rep- sounded over the phone when she saw the volume of songs I imported. Either she thought I spend lots of money on Apple Music downloads, or that I was committing a crime.

I was right: Apple did implement anti-piracy policies to prevent direct transferring outside songs from one device to another. Another user from Apple’s message boards also confirmed that my iTunes wouldn’t work properly because of it. No exporting, no converting, no ease of use.

Imagine going through this for seven years; the current life of my iPad Pro. I’ve used it for almost everything music-wise. It’s helped me document seasonal personal playlists, sort and audition music for future airplay, and even helped run edited shows on the air. All with that considerable degree of difficulty. I never brought it to the gym, on train rides, road trips, or even on neighborhood walks. That’s where both my iPhone came in, picking up the slack which my iPad Pro couldn’t. They never gave me any issues whatsoever on uploading, playing, and overall utility. I don’t put much expectation on them being they’re only 32GB (SE) and 64GB (SE2) respectively, so there’s no need to be perfect there. The only time my iPad Pro didn’t give me any snuff was when I went online (through Safari). Jumping from an iPod to iPad felt like I left a nice, reasonable low-maintenance g.f. for a hotter one that’s mean, demanding, and non-reciprocating. But, I can’t leave the current g.f., because my ex- won’t take me back.

**********

Last month was when the entire house of cards finally toppled.

One night, I tried accessing my iPad Pro with my six-digit passcode I used for all of its life. It’s not going through for some reason. It couldn’t be. I used the same code again, and it locked me out. Am I going insane? I couldn’t possibly forget my six digits, did I? I tried another passcode thinking I had them both confused, and it still locked me out. One minute…five minutes…fifteen minutes…one hour…three hours…eight hours…

This is not going to end well.

There has to be a method to retrieve a current -code, yes? Nada. Only if you had a previous one. Was there another work around to access my iPad? Nil. Not without changing my settings that I couldn’t access. Did force-quitting and updating my iPad to the latest version do it? No no no no. It still had problems.

Holy fucking Batman, Robin! Looks like the only option is doing a factory-reset and blow up the whole damn thing.

There is a known issue with -codes no longer working (out of spite). It’s rare, but it happens. And, the above results are what I got when I looked it up. I couldn’t have changed the passcode before this happened, let alone if some hacker had fun and purposely borked my iPad. Or, the lower man’s response: “It’s Apple! They do this to you purposely for no reason so that you go and buy a new one. That’s why I fucking hate Apple! Fuck Apple!” You must be a Windows fanboy, aren’t you?

I tried attempting many more passcode attempts, force-quits, and iOS updates to see if the problem would correct itself. It didn’t. It could possibly be that legacy models stop updating iOS after six or seven years, but that’s no reason why my -code stopped working. So I came to terms in losing all my stored music and ultimately factory-reset my iPad back to zero.

Goodbye 77,000+ songs. Goodbye to the 200 playlists I will never get back.

**********

I’ve been liberated. No longer waiting several hours for my MP3s to be uploaded. No longer waiting ten seconds for songs to move to playlists, or force-quitting iTunes after freezing. I’m done with it. For good. My o.c.d. is a little better for it. Honestly, I don’t feel bad that I wiped it.

“Uh, what happened with all the songs you had before?” Becky, would you stop with the questions? I have all of my MP3’s backed up on three different drives, sorted and alphabetized as always. I have a 1TB WD Easystore HDD, a 4TB WD MyBook HDD, and on a 2TB Adata SSD installed in my HP Omen desktop that’s used for music and gaming. There is a 4TB Crucial X10 SSD that I’m using only when digitizing my entire physical music library. Only 9% of it has been used, and chances are no more than 12% when all is said and done. I can definitely shove the 285GB worth of MP3s I had on my tablet, and I’d still have lots of storage left over.

At this point, I’ll only be using iTunes for uploading music into my SE2. A highly-important mutual warmed me up to another, better interface called MusicBee. It’s a massive juggernaut compared to iTunes. So massive that you need a college course on how to use it. It has an uncountable number of features and customization ranging from assigning hotkeys, colors, skins, organization, sound effects, and even changing the font. Have your music folder assigned to it and you’re off and running.

The iPad Pro is a non-issue at this point. Once utilized for music, it’s now used to stream college radio or NPR while sleeping. I am currently learning about the business of web design. I could make it useful once again, should I buy a Pencil and install the Adobe Suite or any illustration apps-. Other than that, my iPad will never regain its glory as a go-to music hub.

Ideas for a massive, time-honored basement renovation

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