[hjf3Gd]

Sorry to post again on this, but after more research....can anyone confirm that the iPod Video 5.5 30-pin connector only outputs an analogue line-out signal? If so, I reckon there's no DAC in the Blueye and the diode mod would improve the sound quality, unless I'm missing something. Many thanks,.

 

[MikeyFresh]

Sorry to post again on this, but after more research....can anyone confirm that the iPod Video 5.5 30-pin connector only outputs an analogue line-out signal? If so, I reckon there's no DAC in the Blueye and the diode mod would improve the sound quality, unless I'm missing something. Many thanks,.

It will also output digital, but only in USB device mode, which is compatible with a very small number of external DACs.
The Gen. 5.5 is not capable of USB host mode, that capability starts with the Gen.6 Classic which is compatible with a much wider range of DACs.

 

[hjf3Gd]

It will also output digital, but only in USB device mode, which is compatible with a very small number of external DACs.
The Gen. 5.5 is not capable of USB host mode, that capability starts with the Gen.6 Classic which is compatible with a much wider range of DACs.

Ok, thanks for that, much appreciated. Looks like it might be worth me doing the mod then....

 

[ThinWalls]

Answering my own question from earlier in the thread (in case anyone else finds themselves with the same question), it seems you _can_ go beyond 2Tb with a modded ipod, but only (I think) because of the confusion between Tb, Gb, etc, and Tib Gib units.

Got an ipod to work with 1Tb, 512Gb, 400Gb, 256Gb cards, which adds up to more than the 2Tb limit. But I think that's because the cards are labelled with the SI prefixes not the computer-world binary ones. So that's actually 1000+512+400+256 = 2168Gb, and the FAT32 max is 2Tib = 2048Gib = 2199Gb. So, I guess, if I have this right, anything that adds up to 2199Gb or less will work. Didn't realise till just now that the cards sold as 1Tb are actually 1000Gb not 1024Gb yet alone 1024Gib.

This confusion over terminology is quite annoying (how many times has someone posted questions asking why their hard drive comes out smaller than it was labelled as?).


Still not sure if the 2Tb (or, rather, 2Tib) limit applies before or after the space loss caused by formatting. Also not sure if it's due to the limits of FAT32 itself or if it's more due to how MBR works.

Also not sure if, if you exceed the limit, it will just lose the excess capacity or if it will fail to work at all.

 

[ThinWalls]

There's a reason I ended up with the above peculiar assortment of different capacity cards (all of different makes).

I thought I'd get a 1Tb sd card while Amazon had a cheap offer available, and upgrade a couple of modded ipods. And, Good Lord, it turned out to be _such_ a lot of effort.


The plan was to take the quad flash mod that had cards (512, 512, 400, 400) and update it to (1Tb, 400 400, 200), and then take the 2 512 cards from that and use them to upgrade a second iflash-quad modded ipod from (512, 512, 200, 256) to (512, 512, 512, 512). Thus bringing them both up to about the max 2Tb limit (from the 1.8Tb and 1.4Tb they were to start with).


Drove me mad. Every time I tried to restore the first one in iTunes it, inexplicably, came out as 876Gb rather than the 2Tb I was expecting. The second one kept giving that stupid iTunes "unable to restore - an unknown error occurred" message when I tried to restore it.


To get it to work I had to work through every combination of the eight cards between the two ipods, changing the order and swapping between them and trying again each time to restore to see if anything worked. Kept trying again every few days. Was convinced it was never going to work and that one of the cards or one of the iFlash slots must be faulty.


Yet through sheer trial-and-error eventually found combinations of cards that worked and restored correctly. Ended up with (1024 512 400 256) in one and (512 512 512 400) in the other, and that actually allowed both to successfully restore.

Anyway, just mentioning for anyone who runs into similar problems, that I've found before that different brands/capacities of cards sometimes just refuse to work with each other (perhaps because of different speeds?). At least I _think_ that's what the issue was. The other possibility is with all the repeated restoring and reformatting some problem with the format of one of the cards resolved itself?

 

[Alexy]

Hi everyone,

So basically I haven't posted on Head-fi for the last 12 (!) years, as life went on and I had other priorities than audio, even though I always kept it on my mind. Fast forward to today, I'm slowly but surely back at it, and want to make upgrades but also want to get new gear. Speaking about upgrades, I still have got my U2 edition 5th Gen (30Gb HDD) iPod - if i'm not mistaken - and would still be interested in bringing it back to life. I think I really miss the coverflow display, which was really enjoyable. Anyone from the forum still does modding these ? I assume mine probably needs a new battery now, and obviously a SSD or SD card upgrade. Let me know !

 

[ThinWalls]

To further update my last post...

Experimented with trying to push the FAT32 limit, and it _seems_ that if you go even slightly past the 2TiB (not 2TB) limit, things go haywire. (This is assuming it's not some other problem and I'm mistaking the cause of the issue.)

But if I try an iFlash with 1TB (i.e. 1000GB)+512GB+512GB+200GB cards - which totals 2224GB or 2071GiB, i.e 23GiB over the 2TiB limit - after iTunes restores it, it appears as 5GiB capacity!

Whereas, if I use the same components but downgrade the cards to 1TB+512GB+512GB+128GB - which totals 2152GB or 2004GiB, i.e. 44GiB _under_ the 2Tib limit - it restores correctly.

So it seems that anything over 2TiB, i.e. 2048GiB, or 2199GB, just flat-out fails to restore properly.

Just thought I'd post this in case it's useful to anyone, given the faffing around it took to find this out.

 

[doctorjuggles]

But I think that's because the cards are labelled with the SI prefixes not the computer-world binary ones.

I've been struggling to get anything more than about 1.2tb to work - can you please explain in simple terms what this quoted section means, if you'd be so kind? Even at 1.2tb I've found everything to be hugely unstable

 

[ThinWalls]

I've been struggling to get anything more than about 1.2tb to work - can you please explain in simple terms what this quoted section means, if you'd be so kind? Even at 1.2tb I've found everything to be hugely unstable

Well, storage manufacturers, like hard-drive and (I now realise, though I didn't really think about it before) memory card makers, use the SI meaning of "k/kilo" and "M/Mega" and "G/Giga" and "T/Tera", etc. That is they go in multiples of 1,000 like units of mass or distance etc. So when they say 1GB they mean 1000 Megabytes, and 1MB means 1000 kB, and 1kB means 1000 Bytes.

But most other things in computing use the binary meaning of those prefixes, so use multipliers of 1024. In particular Microsoft use the binary meaning, but insist on using the same prefixes as the SI meaning.

That means that the "1TB" on a memory card actually means 1000GB, which means 1,000,000MB which means 1,000,000,000kB. (It didn't dawn on me that 1TB wasn't 1024GB till just recently - I find it strange that card makers make cards in sizes that go 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB...1000GB, so 2 512GB cards have more space than a "1TB" card).

Whereas MS Windows (and some other things) use those same terms to mean the binary versions (that should technically be denoted as kibi, Mibi, Gibi and Tebi, but people often don't bother to use those prefixes - I notice Rockbox does though).

The net effect (as far as I can work it out) is you need to multiply the capacity of a card marked in GB by approximately 0.9313 to get the actual capacity that Windows will report, and that is relevant to the 2TB (actually 2TiB) limit.

I just now got another ipod working with 1TB, 400GB, 400GB, 400GB cards in it, and that _seems_ to be the optimum, max capacity you can get to work. Although that seems to add up to 2224GB, it's actually not, as the 1TB is 1000GB, and the GB themselves are not GiB, so the total ipod capacity comes out (in Windows) as 1.98TB (by which they mean TiB).
I say _seems_ to be because it's incredibly time-consuming to properly experiment with this, I just have found the couple of times I went slightly over that limit the thing refused to restore correctly in iTunes.

I don't know why you can't get over 1.2TB - I have multiple ipods with between 1.7-1.98TiB that work perfectly well. Am trying to work out what permutation of cards would get them all as close to that 2TB [correction, 2TiB!] limit as possible without going over it. Tedious though that it involves swapping cards between them and restoring and resyching repeatedly (a full synch of my entire library takes over 24 hours!). Made even more complicated by what I mentioned a couple of posts up - that certain combinations of cards refuse to work together - seems safest if all the cards in a device are the same brand, I find. Really don't understand what happens there - had it happen with 2 512GB full size cards in an iFlash dual as well. Those two just would not work together, but when I put them in separate ipods with other cards they worked fine.

You are using Rockbox, I take it? OF would certainly be unstable as soon as the number of files gets too large.

 

[BenGast]

I find it strange that card makers make cards in sizes that go 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB...1000GB,

I agree and I wonder what is the technical reason behind this.

Long time ago the same happened with the transition from MB to GB. The first SD card I bought was a 256MB.

 

[ThinWalls]

I wonder if I'm "barking up the wrong tree" with this. Has anyone else experimented with it? But, as I say, the couple of times I tried going even just a few GB over 2TiB (i.e. over 2199GB), iTunes wouldn't restore the thing properly - so I'm assuming that you can't exceed that limit even by a few GiB. Which means in a quad adapter there are only certain combinations of card sizes that will work.


[Edit] For example, it seems to imply that 1TB, 512GB, 512GB, 200GB won't work (it didn't, the one time I tried it).

Annoyingly, it seems that 512GB cards are 12GB too _large_ to be usable in that arrangement. 1TB, 512GB, 512GB, 128GB seems to work. But a better option would be 1TB, 512GB,400GB, 256GB. Hence, if I'm correct that even going 23GB over the maximum size causes restore to fail, then 400GB cards can be preferable to 512GB ones
(as 1TB 512GB 512GB 200GB - doesn't work, while 1TB 512GB 400GB 256GB does).

But I'm not 100% certain that the failure of the 1TB,512GB,512GB,200GB permutation to work was because it ends up 23GB over the FAT32 limit - it might have been some other issue with those cards. Has anyone else tried permutations that add up to >2.2TB?

 

[MarkGL]

I miss my iPod classic. No DAP has ever given me that same feeling. The problem is I'm a last.fm stats junkie, if someone created a retro iPod classic looking DAP with Bluetooth and WiFi it would be an instant purchase

 

[Alexy]

I miss my iPod classic. No DAP has ever given me that same feeling. The problem is I'm a last.fm stats junkie, if someone created a retro iPod classic looking DAP with Bluetooth and WiFi it would be an instant purchase

Couldn't agree more ! Might bring mine back to life and see what I can do with it

 

[ThinWalls]

Continue to be exasperated at the idiocyncracies of the iflash. It absolutely seems to be the case that only certain combos of brands/capacities/series of cards will work together in the same device. Which means it requires repeated time-consuming experimentation to find which cards will play well together, and ending up with sub-optimal combinations. e.g. the Samsung evo cards refuse to work in the same quad adaptor as the integral ones - in fact, even more baffling, the slower, older A1 integral card will work with them, but the newer, supposedly faster, A2 version won't. So many times have come close to concluding that a particular card is faulty/fake, only to find it works as long as it's teamed with the 'right' combo of other cards.