question about using ipod as primary media storage

replicant · 12-29-2006, 10:37 AM

so i'm working on making the switch to a mac mini in my car (from a windows based carpc) and have made a place in my setup for an external hd, but i got to thinking about it and using a new video ipod (60 or 80 gig) may not be a bad idea. it's much more useful for being on the go. basically you'd get in the car, plug in your ipod, turn on the car and boom osx starts up, mounts the ipod as it should (and by default i THINK itunes goes to the ipod's entry to play music first, instead of to your music library on the hd). has anyone done this or thought about doing this, instead of having a traditional external hd, or no external drive at all (and sticking with the base 60gig hd in the base model mini).

i'd love to hear people's input on this. i don't have a video ipod yet, and currently have a basic 160gig external hd setup for my mini. so i guess it may also come down to price (an 80 gig video ipod is like 400 bones?).

anyway, let's hear your thoughts on this.

MINI4cathy · 12-29-2006, 10:55 AM

First thought -- wait until after the MacWorld trade show in January to see what the newest iPod product announcements are, and for prices on existing modelsa to drop.

Clarifying questions -- You want to have music on both the Mac internal drive and the iPod, but it's different set of music and you don't want to sync the two? Or you don't want to use the Mac's internal drive for music at all?

replicant · 12-29-2006, 11:08 AM

You got it, I will use the ipod for the media drive, not the mini's internal drive. That is what I was going to end up doing with my current 3.5" external hd enclosure, but got to thinking about how much more sense it would make if I used an ipod connected via firewire. To be honest, I used to be a huge fan of just having TONS of music and videos, but now, I'm more into quality instead of quantity, so realistically having an external 60+gig drive to hold all of my music and music videos/tvshows/movies would be sufficient. My longest daily drive is an hour, so that would be plenty of room for an hour's worth of music and/or video.

I have an older monochrome 20gig ipod for now that I could test this theory on, but was curious more for the newer model ipod's; Plus i've always wanted to build an ipod dock into my dash. Correct me if i'm wrong, but, the newer ipod docks and the older ones are different dimensions. So before i got to cutting, glassing and bonding, etc, i wanted to be sure it was worth the effort.

Jirka Jirout · 12-29-2006, 06:20 PM

Yes, I have done this before. I have a "SRC" button in the Music player plug-in and can use it to switch between the music on my internal drive and on the iPod. I have all my regular music and audiobooks on the hard drive and only use iPod for podcasts and smaller updates of the media library though.

replicant · 12-29-2006, 07:16 PM

Thanks for the response Jirka.. If i were to use the ipod as my primary media source, the application I'm using (probably AMP) would have to be able to decipher the fact that I've got the ipod plugged in and want to use it. What music player/application/frontend are you using?

Thanks again.

BarryWoods · 12-30-2006, 01:50 AM

You'll have to use iTunes for music. That file isn't usually viewable on a mac without some application hackery.

tominated · 12-30-2006, 02:33 AM

never us an ipod as a main storage device!!!!!
it's hard drive is designed to just spin at the start of a song and then stop. it doesn't have the room for air to cool it down, so the drive will die quickly!

Jirka Jirout · 12-30-2006, 11:07 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by replicant

Thanks for the response Jirka.. If i were to use the ipod as my primary media source, the application I'm using (probably AMP) would have to be able to decipher the fact that I've got the ipod plugged in and want to use it. What music player/application/frontend are you using?

I am using TatraApp and now switching to QCar. TatraApp uses iTunes (via AppleScript), QCar uses Cocoa's QTMovie class for playback.

As for the iPod detection, in TatraApp I simply query iTunes for available libraries every 10 seconds and if iPod is found, it is added to the list of sources the software allows you to choose from. In QCar, this is handled by getting the notification of a new disk mounted and then verifying it is an iPod (checking existence of some folders and files on the inserted drive).

Jirka Jirout · 12-30-2006, 11:10 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by BarryWoods

You'll have to use iTunes for music. That file isn't usually viewable on a mac without some application hackery.

All you need to do is to parse the contents of iTunes db file on the iPod. You can use code from several open source projects, so it is not a big deal. If you can't do this for licensing purposes, you can use the description of the file's format and write your own parser (which is what we are doing).

replicant · 12-30-2006, 12:03 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by tominated

never us an ipod as a main storage device!!!!!
it's hard drive is designed to just spin at the start of a song and then stop. it doesn't have the room for air to cool it down, so the drive will die quickly!

tominated, let me, i guess, rephrase what i'm wanting to do.

much like itunes plays music from your ipod, i want to use AMP or any other frontend for osx to do the same.. i want it to use the ipod's music library instead of the mini's internal drive's music library.

hope that makes since.

Bugbyte · 12-30-2006, 01:09 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by tominated

never us an ipod as a main storage device!!!!!
it's hard drive is designed to just spin at the start of a song and then stop. it doesn't have the room for air to cool it down, so the drive will die quickly!

I've never heard this. Why would Apple allow you to mount your iPod as an external drive if this caused premature death of the iPod? It's not like they have a sticker on the iPod that says, "only use this for short transfers lasting under a minute".

Also, don't you think the video iPod's spin the drive much more frequently than the regular iPods? Is there a usage or time limitation for running the drive on the iPod with those?

pepsibobby · 12-30-2006, 01:13 PM

I use my ipod like this daily for my camera. I have the ipod adapter, I am constantly using it for space transftering 2gb of files at a time. I have never had any issues.

iamgnat · 12-30-2006, 03:46 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by tominated

never us an ipod as a main storage device!!!!!
it's hard drive is designed to just spin at the start of a song and then stop. it doesn't have the room for air to cool it down, so the drive will die quickly!

This is a bit harsh, but I don't disagree with the basic premise (iPods don't make good external drives).

After recently losing my 4th gen that I had been using to back up one of my Macs for the last 6 months (rsync against ~30GB of data (half changed frequently) every 15 minutes 8-10 hours a day for 5 days a week) i've come the following conclusions:

1) It's spinup/spindown feature which is nice for saving battery power is a PITA when it is in disk mode. It's a slow drive to begin with, and this makes it even worse if the drive isn't kept spinning.

2) It wasn't designed for continuous usage. It was designed to spin up, load the next group of songs, then spin down again. It is also more than capable of infrequent "constant" (e.g. loading music, etc..) use where that represent a burst while loading/unloading it.

So I bought real portable drive to be my backup disk and my wife just got me a new Nano for x-mas

As far as iPod usage in a car, I don't think there would be any noticeable difference to it's life span in a car environment (regardless of how much it is used) outside of leaving it in the car during extreme temps.

-dave

pepsibobby · 12-31-2006, 01:06 PM

i can say that it is slow, but like i said before i have never had any real problems with it.

kandyman676 · 12-31-2006, 06:11 PM

I thought the newer generation of Ipods don't support firewire anymore? USB2.0 is way slower of a transfer rate then firewire 400 and definitely slower then firewire 800.

And as I learned in my Apple desktop certification, iPods can be used as a backup device, you can boot from them as a recovery harddrive OS if they support firewire, but not recommended for daily direct access as a portable harddrive due to battery and spin issues.

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