Question to Ipod owners.

[Remembrance]

So I have one of the older iPods, second generation I believe, that I use with my itrip for the car, and a newer one for walking around.

There was a class action thing awhile back about 2nd gen iPods having really really bad batteries as far as charge retention. I use mine in the car with a charger always hooked up to it because of the same thing.. after about a month the battery life asploded on me. It was never really a problem for the longest time, because I used it mostly in the car and docked at home through winamp, so I let it slide, and then bought one of the newest gen ones.

Anyways, to the point. I hopped on the bandwagon when I heard about this class action battery replacement program, becuase I figured shit, why not get my battery repped for free?

So I send for a box (they send out specific packaging and shit, all payed for, and use a specific courier) and recieve it two days later. Pack my iPod up in the box and ship it off. All the while this iPod is almost entirely full of music (18.4g.)

I get it back in two days, and the music is entirely whiped, not a single song on it, but still has my proper drive assignment and title. I wouldn't think that replacing a battery would whipe all the songs but keep all the system information intact..

Has anyone ever dealt with apple and had an ipod battery replaced and experienced the same thing? I mean I love mac products and (usually..) thier service, and getting the music back is w/e, but it just seemed kind of wtf to me.

sorry for essay =

[Ishido]

I haven't personally dealt with any of the battery problems and sending Ipods in, but I would think that they send replacement units, and just copy your settings but not the entire HD from the previous Ipod. I think my brother might have done this once, I'll ask him what happened... he's owned 4 Ipods(?) I think, and has had a lot of different problems. Personally all the ones I've used have had their battery life slowly get shorter and shorter, but they're still good enough for what I use them for (class, airplane rides, etc).

[Remembrance]

Well its the exact same iPod, as far as the outside goes. All the same nicks/scratches and whatnot.

So unless they took my shell and slapped it onto a new HDD/battery and whatever and copied my sysinfo, I dunno :/

[Popeh]

As far as I'm aware (past retail customer service experience in returns/repairs) most manufacturers including apple will always advise a store to do a soft and hard reset of any device that has information added to it before they consider replacing parts and taking in for service.

With your case being direct, Apple probably did this themselves.

THere was probably a clause in your returns packaging stating not to return anything other than the iPod unit and that your information will be lost etc.

[Huggo]

Did they instruct you to backup your songs before you mailed it in? I believe I have a 2nd gen too, and I am noticing some battery problems. It may just be me, but I think that the more drained the battery gets, the more the volume drops. Either that or I'm just hearing impaired, which is entirely possible.

But from what I understand, when shipping in an electronic item to be repaired, they typically will not leave your stuff intact. Just like sending in your iPod to find the songs removed, Microsoft notified me when I just sent in my Xbox360, not to include the hard drive or any accessories, because they wouldn't be returned. I dunno, I think that may be standard operating procedure.

But do you have those songs backed up on your computer with iTunes? I figure that's the only hope left for all of that music.

And one last thing, on the 1st and 2nd gen iPods, Mac was a bunch of jerks in regards to customer service about flaws in their own hardware. My first one had a dead battery a month after I bought it, and they flat-out refused to replace it. It was only a bit short of a year later that they issued a recall on all 1st and 2nd gens.

[miokomioko]

I got the class-action lawsuit paperwork in the mail, but... I lost it. :( And that was like 2 years ago at least.

[Avé]

Sorry for the 2 week old bump. But I have an iPod question.

I was thinking about getting an iPod, because I need to have some music to listen to while I'm working. I've been looking around and finding that a lot of different places say a lot of different things.

A few years ago, with the while online music store boom, I downloaded like 50 songs from the Wal-Mart Music store. Can these songs be played on an iPod? I've talked to the electronic people at the stores, and some of them say you can convert the songs to put them on the iPod, and some say iPod's only play iTunes music. So, which is it?

I have no clue about any of this stuff: .mp3/m4p/aac/wma/wav and "protected media". I have no idea what any of this means. If the iPod can't play these, what are some other music players that will work

[Anyway]

lol dude if you pay for music to put on your ipod.... go download limewire, save yourself a bunch of moolah.

[theo]

As far as I know, iPod can play:
.mp3, .m4a ( AAC ), and .m4p ( Protected AAC ).

AAC and Protected AAC are both Apple encodings. The "Protected" ones are the kind you buy off of the iTunes Music Store.

The guy who told you it can only play iTunes songs was partially correct. That is, typically you have to use iTunes to put songs onto your iPod. Any songs that are on your hard drive and in your iTunes music library will automatically load onto your iPod when you plug it into your computer. There are other methods that don't involve using iTunes, but those are all considered third-party and not officially supported by Apple.

As for the Wal Mart music, I've never used it before so dunno. What does the file extension end in? If its song.mp3 then your fine. If its something else, you can probably find a simple song converter online. Without knowing the .extension its kinda hard to answer the question.

And yeah, Limewire "Music Store" ftw lol.

[Huggo]

From what I've seen, if you keep your MP3s in iTunes, iPod will just play them no questions asked. I download a lot of "free" (read: illegal) music and open it in iTunes, my iPod plays it just fine.

[Remembrance]

Re: huggo. Nah they didn't tell me to take anything off so blah. And I just delete the music off this mac, (its a laptop) 'cuz I have hdd space issues if I keep it on. Its all redownloaded now though ;0

[Avé]

I gave in and bought the music because I was tired of searching through the tons of crap files that you get free. (Crap as in repeating the same 5 seconds for 2 mins, songs cutting off halfway through, or songs not even playing at all.) Nowadays I get most of my music by downloading torrents of a CD and deleting all the extra songs I don't want.

As for the Wal Mart music, I've never used it before so dunno. What does the file extension end in? If its song.mp3 then your fine. If its something else, you can probably find a simple song converter online. Without knowing the .extension its kinda hard to answer the question.

The Wal-Mart Music is a .wma, but it says that it's a protected media.