iPod excitements and frustrations

So I'm building an iPod. I actually got a job and started making money, so of course I would be financially responsible and start a new expensive hobby. All this because I'm trying to stray from streaming and I've found myself to be much more fond of having dedicated hardware for listening to music. I figured my best and - at the end of the day - most reliable route would be to buy an iPod.

Tomorrow comes the replacement hold switch. I'll tell ya the story about that.

So I racked up some cash, went around the markets looking for an old busted up iPod that hopefully still worked. I wound up buying this iPod Classic (7th Generation) from Mercari with a busted casing and a fucked up screen. No biggie, I think to myself, I'll just buy a new screen, and I was already planning on changing the shell of it. I buy a replacement screen off Elite Obsolete Electronics and a faceplate and backplate from eBay. The screen and backplate arrive a little over a week later, but I realized that I had mistakenly bought my replacement faceplate and Clickwheel from a Chinese vendor, so that took much longer to arrive.

No biggie, I think to myself, I'll just replace the screen while it gets here.

So I get the iPod open, which I didn't find to be the most difficult, which is surprising because the 7th Gen is notorious for being a pain in the ass to get disassembled. Everything beyond that was incredibly easy, and I didn't really need an iFixIt guide or whatever to figure out what I'm doing.

So I get the screen replaced. It's important to know that before all of this, the device wouldn't spend longer than 10 seconds turned on, which I figured was because it didn't detect anything happening. When I installed the new screen, however, I realized that this big red X was the only thing it wanted to display. To my dismay despite every thought and prayer that it would not be, the hard drive turned out to be dead.

So with that, I went ahead and bought a new hard drive from eBay. In while the new hard drive was coming, I kept fiddling with the connectors to see if I could get it to work; cleaning the hard drive cable, checking the battery cable, all that. I'm doing so I inadvertently snapped the connector to the battery. Great now something else I have to replace.

Except there were two things that struck me when I went onto removing the battery; the adhesive was already broken, so it kinda furthered my suspicions that the iPod had already been dug into, along with the fact that the padding on the hard drive was inexplicably torn. Furthermore, the battery was puffed up, so I needed to replace the battery anyway because as far as I know right now I have a lithium ion death capsule which I put in a glass Mason jar with currently little knowledge on how exactly to deal with it. It sits on my desk now.

New battery and hard drive arrive, and I use the new battery to test the new hard drive.

And I still get the damn red X.

Well shit. I worked with what I had for the moment and went ahead and started to migrate all the backplate stuff to the new one. However, in doing so, I unpasted the battery to correct it's orientation and snapped the goddamned hold switch, and I snapped it while it was off, so I couldn't control the damn thing anymore. So I had to get a new headphone jack/hold switch, along with a new ribbon cable for the hard drive which was the last thing I could do before I rendered the thing a complete dud.

The HDD cable arrives a day later and lo and behold the damn thing actually works. I recover it with iTunes and bada-bing bada-boom the thing works and I can start syncing my 2000 or so songs. Some albums couldn't transfer cause they were too high res, like In the Court of the Crimson King, which was at 24 Bit/92kHz. I still can't control it, which is why the hold switch is important.

I was actually supposed to get that stupid hold switch back in Tuesday, but by error of either the seller or Amazon, I got a completely wrong package which wasn't even being sold by the seller, so I had to return it and get a replacement. It comes today and hopefully its the actual correct thing.

I'll show y'all once it's actually done.