Downloading old iPod and wiping old Zune

I have an iPod Nano 6th gen, a Zune 4G, and an iPhone 6 I've been hanging on to. Or rather they've been hanging on to my electric service, just sitting there charging, unused for years, going on decades.

I've been in a clean-out phase for awhile, and a ton of old electronics are gone. These had hung around because the iPod had some music I had made on it, the Zune had possibly better bitrate cd rips than my pc archives, and I used the iPhone 6 as a home monitor occasionally (to watch the dog when we were on vacation). But the day had come to get rid of them. The question was could they be downloaded and wiped first.

First the iPod. I googled for awhile.  I ended up finding what I needed to get the music off from these links: 

• https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-found-my-old-ipod.2377868/ 
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/sgki45/how_do_i_pull_music_from_my_ipod_to_macbook_pro/

I hooked the iPod up to my M1 mac, found the folder in Finder, and pressed command+shift+period. Then I copied the files to my mac, mostly the music folder. The mp3s had strange short names. I then copied them to a Windows 10 desktop. I installed iTunes from the Microsoft Store.  I imported the songs and set the organize in Music folder option in Preferences (so that they would be put in Artist and Album folders and get the filenames converted to song names. I then grabbed the nicely-organized files from the Music/iTunes/Music folder in Explorer, and moved them where the rest of my music was.

Next I unchecked the device autosync option in iTunes and connected the device. There's a little box that appears in the top left (ish) of the iTunes window. I wish I had grabbed a screenshot. Choosing that box put iTunes into some device mgt mode, and I was able to restore the iPod to factory settings, basically reloading the version of the OS that was on it.

One down! Next I tackled the Zune. I decided I didn't want to bother trying to save the music. So I just wanted to restore it to factory. Googling led to this link:

• https://tipok.org.ua/node/30#:~:text=Format%20Device%20from%20the%20Zune,%22erase%20all%20content%22%20button.

So I "unlocked" the device, and held down the "back" and "up" keys. The next part is tricky. You then hold down "back"  and "play/pause", but you have to do it when the screen turns black from the last step, not when the device finishes rebooting. If you do it right, it tells you it's going to wipe your content, and then goes ahead.

Two devices down! The iPhone, being half the age of the others and more sophisticated, was much easier. But the iPhone battery had swollen, bulging the actual iPhone case right apart at the seams, even though it was half the age of the others. Nonetheless, I was able to remove my Apple ID/account, and reset the device, and then turn it off.

It would be nice to get the iPod and Zune into the hands of enthusiasts or collectors, but in my experience it's practically impossible, so all three are headed to Staples to get recycled today.

Microsoft shoots self in foot AGAIN

• http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/xbox-music-preview-144504
• http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/microsoft-itunes-xbox-music-144505
• http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/10/slick-xbox-music-coming-to-xbox-windows-8-but-windows-7-not-so-much
• http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/14/microsoft-xbox-music/
• http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/15/3502846/xbox-music-windows-7-windows-phone-support

“Hey I’ve got an idea, let’s release an amazing new music service, and completely shun our biggest user-base and our most popular product!” (not an actual quote, just a dramatization)

This is Microsoft’s idea of how to roll out a new music service – don’t offer it to the hundreds of millions of users of their current flagship consumer PC operating system, Windows (7).

Or here’s another great idea, make it first available on your game console (XBOX). Who listens to music while they are trying to play a game or watch TV (and I don’t mean watch TV through the XBOX)? Oh but there’s an additional $60 per year charge to listen to music on your game console versus other platforms.

How do they come up with this stuff? This is a clear case of management by committee. Straight stupid. When they force me off my Zune subscription with the 10 songs to keep per month, I’m going straight to Spotify with my money.

Sync Nirvana has been achieved

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a focus on, and a personal interest in, PIM (personal information management). And while I've made a lot of progress the last couple of years in getting my PIM solution defined, the one missing piece has always been that I was unable to create new calendar entries that had alerts (reminders), using my preferred alerting method (which is a series of emails from Google Calendar), except by using the "full" (desktop) version of the Google Calendar web page.

I couldn't (get entries with preferred reminders) in the iPhone calendar app. I couldn't in Microsoft Outlook on the Windows desktop. I couldn't in the mobile Google calendar page.

But let me summarize my PIM solution so that you have the context. It's a triangle with 3 corners.

First corner: Outlook runs on the desktop for calendar, contacts, and email when I am there. It also provides another key component - backup of the cloud. Many folks are learning the rashness of not keeping a local copy of what is in the cloud. The company goes under, or the servers go down, or your account is compromised or deleted or locked out, and you are done. But not if you have a local backup.

Second corner: Google is my current cloud PIM solution for calendar, contacts, and email. They have highly functional and efficient web-based clients to fill every gap. They have mature API's and robust standards support.

Third corner: iPhone/iPad is my mobile client of choice. Apple has a unique focus on the user. They understand the toaster paradigm (people don't want to configure drivers, manage updates, and reboot their toaster, they just want to push a button and make toast). Apple's products, for the most part, strive to get out of the way and let you do what you came to do.

I should note here that I do not try to add iCloud as another cloud provider. It might be possible, but it doesn't make sense to make things more complicated than necessary. I do think the interesting thing with iCloud is it is vertical integration (it's for Apple products) and thus will always tend to lead to insularity rather than homogeneity, which goes against the whole point of the cloud in my opinion. Very interesting to me.

The coolest part of the triangle is getting them all syncing back and forth. That means a change on any one is replicated on both the other corners. And this has to be "non-rickety" - adding a phone number to a contact on one platform can't cause the email address to go away on another.

I actually bought a product to take care of syncing Google to Outlook, after a long period of research and trial and error. I'd prefer something from Google or Microsoft, but alas. The product I bought is gSyncit  (http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/software/gsyncit3 ).

I use a host of connections on the iPhone to sync back and forth with Google. In fact I use a different one for each of mail, calendar, and contacts. I use "Exchange” account for contacts, “Other” (Pop/Smtp) for email, and the “Gmail” account for Calendars. Actually it was moving to that last one that is part of the final fix. More on that in a minute.

Note in my diagram that the last connecting line (between Outlook and the iPhone) is grayed out. I am not syncing these two because Google takes care of that. I could do a sync with either iTunes or with iCloud directly between them, but I don’t see the benefit at this point.

 

Some other miscellaneous parts of my PIM solution follow:

TYPE	SOLUTION	COMMENTS
Notes	Evernote	The notes are in their cloud, and Evernote has desktop, iOS, and web clients which all sync with their cloud.
Notes	OneNote	Second choice, but I'm evaluating it because it is more accepted in business and now has an iOS client and can sync to the MS cloud Skydrive.
Tasks	Toodledo	Tasks on their website, and there is a web client and iOS clients. Prefer the organization over Remember The Milk. I'm not currently syncing tasks back to the desktop, but I just read that gSyncIt has expanded to Toodledo (and Evernote and a mess of others).
Passwords/Bookmarks	eWallet	No cloud yet, but they have wifi sync between the desktop and iOS clients, very secure, supports many types of information.
Passwords/Bookmarks	Lastpass/Xmarks	For bookmarks and passwords associated with websites, this can be more easy to use on the desktop, because they integrate with the desktop browser. Not as easy to use on iOS, but they do have apps.
Music	Zune	I have Zunes still and use Zune software and the subscription service.
Podcasts	Zune
TV/Movies	misc	I use Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and iTunes for TV and Movies. There’s still a lot of innovation to come in this category.
Pictures/Videos	na	I keep all of these local, and back them up. I use explorer to get them off the iPhone. I don’t sync them around.
Backup	iDrive	offsite file backup

 

Ok, finally on to the topic in the title. How did I finally discover a way to create calendar entries with my preferred email reminders on something other than the desktop version of Google calendar?

Like I said above, the first key is switch from whatever iPhone account you are using for Google calendars (probably Exchange) and use Google Sync (listed as “GMAIL!” in add accounts). Google Sync will use your default reminders set in Google calendar if you don’t add them in iPhone. This was a revelation. I found out about it here - http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile/sxF0iQs7bR4 . As noted in that forum though, this breaks multiple calendars, which is a problem as that is how I follow the rest of the family. They point you to the following URL http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ with some instructions - http://www.knowliz.com/2009/02/how-to-sync-multiple-calendars-with.html but that didn’t work for me, my other calendars never showed up. Then finally I found - http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151674&topic=13950&ctx=topic which lead me to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect . I was able to successfully add my other calendars there, and have them show up on my iPhone.

So finally, after literally years, my PIM search is done. Only remaining question is, how long with this fragile peace last?

Zune Pass Music Subscription Price Increase

http://zuneinsider.com/2011/09/29/zune-music-marketplace-expands-to-canada-new-changes-to-zune-music-pass-in-the-us/

http://www.winsupersite.com/blog/supersite-blog-39/zune-2/zune-pass-heads-canada-140761

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/09/29/microsoft-taking-zune-to-canada-revamping-zune-pass/

Don’t read those blog posts wrong, Zune is not lowering the price, it is raising it. Currently I pay $14.99 for the monthly subscription PLUS 10 free song downloads per month. Starting in October new subscribers will pay $9.99 for the monthly subscription with NO free song downloads. (It appears I will be able to keep my plan if I want.)

If we postulate that average song downloads cost or are worth about a dollar, then $10 out of my $14.99 each month was for the downloads, meaning I was paying $4.99 for the subscription service. That was a great deal! Now they want to charge me twice as much? Boo.

Is this a chance for Spotify to swoop in, undercut the new price and steal my business, my money, my loyalty, my heart away from Microsoft? (Sorry for the dramatics, they are aimed at motivating Microsoft.)

It actually isn’t Spotify’s big moment, but as usual the devil’s in the details. Spotify on my iPhone is only available (after the trial) with the $9.99 plan, not the $4.99 plan they also offer. Furthermore according to Spotify’s website, if I am reading it correctly, the premium account only extends to 3 devices (phone or pc).

My current Zune plan includes 3 pcs and 3 devices, but it looks like the new Microsoft plan is for 4 devices total (new users losing 2). However they have thrown in some music videos (psh).

The number of tracks each has seems to be roughly equivalent – today I saw mention of 15 million on Spotify’s site and 14 million on Zune’s. I’m sure that goes back and forth. And I’m sure that the depth on particular kinds of music varies between the services.

Bottom line, this is a bad time for Microsoft to raise the price, because they put themselves on par with Spotify, which was more expensive, but doesn’t require a Zune or Microsoft phone. That said, I’ll probably stick with them while my Zune hardware lasts and I can keep my plan for $4.99/month. After that I’m a free agent!

Zune hijacking Win7 libraries now optional

At some point in the past the excellent and free  Zune media player for Windows 7 changed from having it’s own configurable watched folders to tying into Windows “Libraries” for music, videos, and pictures, which was highly annoying if the media in your libraries was any way a sub- or super-set of the media you wanted in Zune. Obviously somebody heard my cries of annoyance, because today I noticed that something had changed with my watched folders, and while checking on them in Zune settings, I found a new option to divorce Zune and libraries, which I quickly utilized. Thank you Microsoft.

Zune subscription - Error C00D0BBE - Zune software can't verify usage rights

File under “I hope you can learn from my mistakes”

I had downloaded 3 or 4 albums for a certain band using the Zune subscription. I noticed that the release year was all the same for the albums, and it was not the year that most of them came out originally. There are several possible explanations for this, for instance reissue. I didn’t even bother to track that down. However I wanted to listen to them in order, so I changed the release year in the Zune media player, which is as simple as clicking on the picture of the album and choosing edit from the resulting context menu. I would guess this probably affects the mp3 file properties as well as the Zune metadata database.

Unfortunately I didn’t start to listen to them right away, thus it took me a really long time to connect the error message I got when I tried to play them later, “Error C00D0BBE - Zune software can't verify usage rights”, with the fact that I had changed the album/song properties.

Once I did I just deleted the albums and re-downloaded them, which fixed the problem right away. It’s possible just changing the year back might have fixed them but I doubt it, and didn’t want to mess with that.

Even though I understand what caused the problem, I still consider this a bug or a shortcoming.

Fix the Zune Software

…“In IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connection tab. Click the LAN settings button and then uncheck "Automatically detect settings."…

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/20/tip-of-the-week-speed-up-zune-marketplace-searches.aspx

This is amazing! Searches of the online Zune content from the Zune software are instantly fixed. And what an amazing difference. I’m surprised I never thought of this because I have seen this setting fix other similar problems.

If you have any cases where there is a initial hesitation by some piece of software that connects to the internet somehow, then try unchecking this setting. The reason is that because IE is the browser that comes with Windows, and the IE proxy settings are exposed via several APIs, they have become the de-facto global proxy settings, and many Windows applications check them before any internet communications. And this particuar setting says “go look around on your local filesystem and network to see if anybody has ever put one of the standard proxy config files in". There’s some long default timeout that will hurt you every time this is examined.

So even if you don’t run Zune software, and don’t use Internet Explorer, you should still go turn this off right now. Very cool!