My iPod (4G) has seen good times and bad times. It’s taken a beating. I’m not gentle with it and it is hard to treat it like the babe it was during those first few magical weeks . I take it with me everywhere. It’s thrown into my bag. Bounced off the dash board of my car. Played in the hands of a toddler and smacked against the breakfast table to resuscitate its ailing disk drive. No way I’m sending it back to Cupertino for the cool 200 some odd bucks to have it delicately refurbished.
Last night I got it into mind to reset the whole damn thing. It talked to the Apple servers, updated the firmware, erased the disk and reloaded all my songs. Simple enough. Baby is back.
However this morning I noticed it was skipping songs. Like a song would come up on the screen and then skip. Entire albums and single songs. I couldn’t make any sense of it.
So when I was coming home from work tonight I decided to put it on shuffle to see if I could spot a pattern why it was skipping some songs.
After about 10 songs it occurred to me that it was skipping songs I had purchased from the Apple music store. Hmmm. DRM was surely the culprit but how do I fix it?
When you reset the iPod it asks you to rename the iPod. Apple has it so each indvidual player is identified on your computer and authorized to play songs associated with that computer. Well, in my eagerness to start fresh I renamed my iPod something different which in turn broke the DRM link to my computer.
The Fix? Easy as pie. I synced the iPod again and changed the name of my iPod back to its old name and the purchased songs are now playing. The broken link being effectively re-established.
Sort of fussy on Apple’s part but I figured Microsoft would of made it like a billion times harder to bring those songs back if you could at all.
So, just thought I’d let you know. That’s how that works.
Just sent my G4 powerbook – also somewhat violently, or at least carelessly abused at times – to apple because of water damage. I think my little ones spilled orange juice in and around it. apple quoted me $1300 for the repair. There goes my August vacation. My Lanvin flats. Why coudn’t it have been my ipod?
I mean my MacBookPro. Sorry. Tired. No more computer. Must sleep.
Aw, that totally sucks. It’s a tough call, either way you’re gonna pay. Repair or replace. BTW, I have a G4 PowerBook in my office. Just sitting there. Unused. The guy who owns it (actually the school owns it) doesn’t like it. So it just sits there, doing nothing. Sniff.
That what happens when you pay for music 😉