I've recently become aware that the way that I have been listening to music has been changing.

Long gone are the days that I listen to an album from start to end in its entirety. I'm now much more likely to listen to a random mix on YouTube on my phone instead, undoubtedly punctuated by obnoxious adverts and incessant buffering as soon as I venture anywhere with less than stellar 4G coverage.

I recently found myself wanting to go back to the days of having my whole library in my pocket, even though it is orders of magnitude larger than when I was a 13 years old listening to My Chemical Romance on my 8GB 3rd generation iPod nano.

What were my options?

YouTube/Spotify

Ads and buffering are enough for me to discount this option. Even if I paid for YouTube Music or Spotify premium I have obscure tracks in my library that I know aren't available on either, hell there are still mainstream releases not available on streaming platforms.

An Old iPod

A decent option for some, however there is one big problem for me. The highest capacity iPod ever officially made is still not big enough to hold my entire library. As well as this the higher capacity iPod classics have held their value pretty well over the years and are still relatively expensive on the second hand market. Also, I hate iTunes, it was the worst part of the experience of owning an iPod. Why can't I just drag and drop files like every other MP3 player in existence?!

A New MP3 Player

This is what I was hoping would be the solution but I guess in the age of cloud computing nobody actually stores their own data any more. The largest capacity MP3 players I could find weren't much larger than the old iPods. No iTunes though!

My Solution

I wanted a device that fit my requirements without displaying any of the drawbacks inherent with the more stock options readily available. It became obvious pretty early that I would have to dip my toes into the world of iPod modding to assemble an alternative. So that's what I did.

Base iPod

I scoured eBay for a while and ended up pulling the trigger on a second hand 5.5th generation 80GB iPod video. It was in poor condition, with a scratched up front plate and a battery that wouldn't even hold enough charge to stay turned on unless it was plugged into a power source.

Perfect!

I chose this particular model for a few reasons:

• It's the last iteration to contain the highly sought after Wolfson DAC which, although subjective, audiophiles generally agree makes for a better sounding device.
• The 80GB capacity iPod has the version of the 820-1975 logic board with 64MB of RAM in comparison to the 30GB iPod which has 32MB of RAM. Whether this actually makes any difference is probably debatable, but with the final storage size I had in mind I decided to be on the safe side.

Note: This didn't end up mattering as I've completed this mod with both versions of the logic board and haven't noticed any slowdown with the 32MB version.

• The 80GB version also has quite a thick back case to house the larger HDD, space which I planned to use up.

The first thing I did was to replace the scratched up front plate with a clear one that I found on AliExpress.

Although I used this particular model, the following mods should be doable with many different iPod models, certainly the iPod classic models, but do your own research to be sure before purchasing anything.

3000mAh Battery

Since the iPod couldn't hold any power I had to replace the battery. Luckily there are an abundance of knock-off iPod batteries on eBay and AliExpress and while the original iPod video battery is 550mAh these knock-off batteries go much higher. The battery I purchased was reported as 3000mAh and although it is much higher capacity than the OEM, similarly labelled batteries have been estimated to actually have a capacity of around 1800mAh. Still, that's plenty for my use case.

Actually performing the modification was very easy, thanks to the previous popularity of iPods there are many great tear-down and repair/replacement guides online. I used the guides on iFixit which I'd recommend.

iFlash-Quad

My biggest problem with the stock iPod was the storage size so that had to be addressed. Luckily iFlash make a bunch of different adaptors to replace those pesky low capacity HDDs that come as stock. I chose the iFlash-Quad adaptor which allows you to install up to 4 MicroSD cards into your device to achieve a higher storage capacity. These adaptors even boast a lower power consumption, longer runtimes and even lead to a faster UI when compared to the original Hard drive. The SD cards I used with the iFlash adaptor were 4 SanDisk Ultra 200GB microSDXC Memory Cards, taking my iPod storage up to a whopping 800GB!

Rockbox

According to the Rockbox website

Rockbox is a free replacement firmware for digital music players.

It has many advantages over the basic iPod firmware not the least of which being the fact that it allows you to interact with the iPod as a normal USB device. You can simply copy and paste your music files instead of having to sync the iPod with the abomination that is iTunes or the iPod database.

Note: Here is a simple bash script that I wrote to keep my iPod and music library in sync:

#!/bin/sh 

LIBRARY=${1:-/home/max/Music/} 
IPOD=${2:-/media/ipod/Music/} 

echo Copying files from $IPOD to $LIBRARY 
rsync -av --ingore-existing $IPOD $LIBRARY 
echo Successful sync from $IPOD to $LIBRARY 

echo Copying files from $LIBRARY to $IPOD 
rsync -av --ignore-existing $LIBRARY $IPOD 
echo Successful sync from $LIBRARY to $IPOD

It is also available here if you want to clone the repo.

Rockbox also gives you FLAC support, and a really nice parametric equaliser that is highly configurable so that you can EQ the sound to your taste.

Installing Rockbox will even allow you to run a bunch of games including Doom on your iPod!

The only problem with Rockbox is that the stock installation has a very 90's user interface.

This can be easily fixed as there are a wide selection of themes available, and you could always make your own if none tickle your fancy!

I personally like the default iPod user interface which is also fine as there are a few themes that are essentially clones of the stock iPod themes. I recommend and am using iVideo but there are others available such as iClassic.

Aftermath & Issues

Overall I've been loving the new modded iPod, it's so liberating not having to worry about whether or not I have a good signal.

I did bump into one strange bug, which I think is from the combination of Rockbox and the iFlash-Quad adaptor. Occasionally, during music playback a song would skip, and then on every subsequent play the track would skip at the same part. I noticed that this issue disappeared if I transferred the songs while the iPod was in disk mode (Hold down the Center and Play buttons until the Apple logo appears) instead of while Rockbox was loaded.

Note: About two months after finishing this mod I ended up dropping the iPod onto a concrete floor and although it still booted fine the music playback stopped working completely. I ended up replacing the headphone jack hoping it would not be a problem with the logic board but alas I was out of luck and had to bite the bullet and replace the logic board. This repair was actually much easier than I was anticipating and the iPod is back to working at full performance!