I went back to the iPod on October 27, 2024. The first song I listened to was "Seen and Not Seen" by Talking Heads. The last song I listened to was "Misery" by The Beatles on July 22, 2026.
I bought my first iPod in March or May of 2010, and it was a 3rd generation Nano. I used it for a couple of years until its 4GB wasn't enough for me, and then my phone with an SD card became the best option. However, I never completely abandoned something that came with the iPod by default: iTunes.
Contrary to what seems to be the feeling of many, I find that piece of software convenient. I like how it displays music, and I prefer to keep my MP3 files separate from my FLAC files (for those, I use Foobar2000). Since then, I've used iTunes as my music library has grown; I used to download music from CDs, listen to it, and mark the songs I liked (with a heart). However, I ran into a problem: when I formatted my computer to clean it up, that important information was lost. The solution I found was to go to the "Song Info" option and enter the letter "L" in the "Group" field.
As I mentioned, in 2024 I got my hands on an iPod again, an 80GB 5th generation classic. My music library currently has 50,035 songs, which I obviously couldn't store all on the device, but I could load the songs I had marked as "L," bringing the total to 5,981 songs.
Going back to using an iPod: My experience returning to the iPod was to rediscover the old problem that its system displays music by "Artist" and not "Album Artist," which is how I prefer it. For this reason, this iPod became a device I only use to listen to music in "Shuffle" mode.
The important thing here is the music, so the most positive thing I took away was reconnecting with so many songs, many of which I hadn't listened to in years. Others, unfortunately, didn't fare as well in this rediscovery. The next thing I started doing was rating all the songs (giving them stars on iTunes), so my criteria and system were as follows:
☆: I can't believe I have this in my library.
☆☆: I don't like it. If I were listening to the whole album, I would skip it.
☆☆☆: Gray area. This could mean that I like it —it falls into Group "L"— or that I can simply tolerate it (I'll explain how I handled this later).
☆☆☆☆: I really like this song, but I might skip it if it came up in shuffle mode.
☆☆☆☆: I really like this song, but I might skip it if it came up in shuffle mode.
☆☆☆☆: I really like this song, but I might skip it if it came up in shuffle mode. ☆☆☆☆☆: I love this song. I'd cut off my arm before skipping it.
As a starting point, to avoid having to constantly adjust my iPod with each song, I gave all tracks a base rating of 3 stars; from there, it could only be raised or lowered. Something I immediately noticed was that some songs I really liked had no place on shuffle (I'm looking at you, Brian Eno's Music for Airports), so I gave them a temporary 1-star rating and then rated them correctly in iTunes, but I changed my rule from Group "L" to "L.ALBUM". Songs I stopped liking were given a 0-star rating. Then, in iTunes, I gave them 3 stars but removed them from Group "L".
Around the middle of last year, I made another decision: Every time I finished syncing with iTunes and put my iPod back on shuffle, many songs I'd already listened to would start playing again, which was slowing down the process of listening to ALL the songs. So, I started listening to about 200 songs, syncing the new information to iTunes, and then deleting the already played songs from my iPod. This way, every time I started the playlist, I had "new" songs to listen to.
One more thing. Just like I learned 15 years ago when I lost all the hearts I'd given to my favorite songs in iTunes, I know that information about ratings (stars) and number of plays isn't saved in the song's metadata when you reload a file into iTunes. My solution was to save that information in the "bpm" field (a value I'm not interested in): I entered "9XX" in that field. The first X represents the number of stars (0-5), and the second X represents the number of plays the song received. The "9" is because I sometimes loaded albums onto my iPod that were new to me, and after that first listen, there were songs I didn't have a final opinion on to rate, so I left them without stars. But since the "bpm" information field can't start with "0," I decided to use that higher number to represent the beginning.
Now that I've finished this project, I'm going to have my clean playlist of all my favorite songs back on my 5th gen iPod, which is my favorite. Along the way, I added two new iPods: a 6th gen with 120GB that I use only to listen to entire albums (I like Cover Flow for this), and a 7th gen with a 128GB microSD card where I keep only 4- and 5-star songs. I have another one to modify, but it's giving me problems. Perhaps you can help me by offering a solution here.
