introduction

october 4th, 2012. i was sitting quietly in my dad's truck. he was still working as a landscaper, and i was along for the ride while he topped up on supplies - pipes and pots and all that. i was clicking around on my ipod nano - a 5th gen model, slim and green in my fiddling paws. i locked it, anticipating my father's return, but when i went to unlock it....

it turned out that the locking mechanism had broken. i proceeded to remove the top cover, which was thinner than you would expect a cover to be, and exposed the switch. it didn't work, still. and then, i left it to gather dust in my assorted storage.

until yesterday. a family friend wanted help recovering information from his ipod touch, and gave me a very yellowed and worn cord with which to connect it. and, well, i figured, this would fit in the ipod nano i have, and i couldn't see enough warping under the display to warrant an exceptional amount of battery pillowing.

as a friend phrased it in dms with me, "clock's ticking", and i was willing to be a little risky. the wikipedia page has some information, but the lithium-ion battery page has more specifics. tldr: it could explode if it was put under enough pressure. but i really wanted these files. so i plugged it in.

and you know what?

it worked.

recovery

upon plugging it into my pc using that decade-old cable, i saw this hopeful screen: the boot screen.

this quickly switched to the main menu, and then, realizing it was still locked, the system displayed a generic 'connected' prompt,

after all this time, i still hadn't figured it out, but it turned out, as i described earlier, i had removed the top panel to expose the locking mechanism. and it turns out that mechanism is really tiny.

luckily, using the blunt tip of a mechanical pencil (no lead!), i opened it back up, and i managed to properly unlock it.

the library of "altias"andria

it's alive...

this is my ipod nano, "iWarrior". i forgot i'd named it that, honestly. i misremembered it as "moonsetter", which was actually the name of my ipod touch, which i got right after this nano was quietly retired.

i was really honestly surprised how much is on this thing. most of it was music. we'll get to that in a bit, but i want to go on an aside about the games on this thing.

the games

this is spore: origins, a extremely pared-down variant of the version on the ipod touch and classic. the ipod was not meant to be a gaming device!

for a quick and messy overview by a kid from that time period playing it on the ipod nano, 'spore ipod nano' by dvd1234yay goes over the basics, and shows the gameplay, even if it's shaky.

the gameplay was much like the cell stage in the full game (Spore). you could customize a creature, spin your creature with the clickwheel, and grow bigger and bigger.

it also featured a sandbox mode where you could play audio from your library. on load, it would pause for anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds. (reiterating: this doohickey was not meant to game.) then it would play the music properly while allowing you to control the creature you made.

when looking into the game again, i found the iPod clickwheel preservation project, which seems to have a good portion of the iPod game library available for emulation using a virtual machine. i may try poking at it myself in the future.

on to the music

when i said it was mostly music, i mean it was half the entire size of the storage.

from itunes i was able to see the list of songs and export the metadata from them, including plays and dates things were added, and even how many times a song has been skipped!

the full listing can be viewed here. the only edits i made were done to correct the name of an artist who transitioned since the time period this came from. yay!

a large amount of the library is homestuck music or lapfox music. i don't care about homestuck now, but i do still very much like emma essex's music. (i stopped caring about the decade-old callout that didn't have substantial anything. it only served to isolate a transfem from their community and surround them with harassment. maybe you could do with doing the same?)

there are other library items that serve to sprinkle in a bit of forest flavor in between the more widely popular entries. the entirety of the gay purr-ee ost, a few tindeck rips, some tumblr mp3s, a handful of anime songs, and so on. it does really paint some kind of picture of the kind of creature i was.

more surprising than anything, to me, is the amount of songs i was able to recover that are - to my knowledge - not archived elsewhere, either on my PC or in places like youtube or internet archive. there's a one-off song from some person on fur affinity that seems to have been deleted since. really crazy stuff! i'll probably archive these on IA properly, sooner or later.

also, funny thing about how the ipod nano organized files: the entirety of my library was sectioned into fourteen different folders labeled f00 to f13,, and each song was labeled with a random four-letter combination. if it weren't for the metadata and list of titles, i'd have no idea what some of these were.

and with that... let's get to the part i was looking forward to the most!

my "itunes wrapped"

here's another link to the listing, if you want to follow along: bing!

most played song: really hungry really tired (by truxton/lapfox), 196 plays

most skipped song: a history of babies (by toby fox, from "the baby is you"), 16 skips

least listened songs: all by my self (celine dion), coma talk (june lalonde), you can't hate me as much as i do (june lalonde), roses red violets blue (gay purr-ee), tied four ways with 1 play each

oldest songs: wolfquest 2: survival of the pack and original soundtracks (tim buzza), running in the 90s (initial D), all added on 12/22/2010

last listened song: Title Demo 1 (pokemon RSE ost), princess of helium (homestuck vol 9), last played 10/4/2012 11:57 pm

last added song: cool guy has chill day, DICKEY RIDE (southern playas), added 8/7/2012 at 8:41 and 8:42am

most played albums: minecraft: volume alpha (c418), hellhound (truxton/lapfox), mobius trip and hadreon kaleido (michael guy bowman); all these albums are present for the top 30 songs in the list sorted by plays

most regrettable album: the baby is you, by toby fox. why did i not put it in a different folder that isn't indexed by itunes? or something. lmfao.

the deepest cut: DICKEY RIDE BY SOUTHERN PLAYAS. this song was an in-joke with some tumblr friends at the time. shoutouts dingoinnuendo dot tumblr dot com.

"oh god where has this been??": Hatsune Miku sings Famicon classics, PONPONPON IN HELL MOTHERFUCKER by hrmnzr, and Cradle of forest (8bit) by michelSA. that was my shiiiiit

"it really was 2012, huh": Rebecca Black Friday (Brock's Dub). god she did not deserve that

i hope to fully rename and tag the rest of my library in the coming months. (i am allowing some user error of "i forgot i was going to do that" or "ill do it later" x100.) and hopefully i can find a way to safely dispose of this ipod before it explodes into a billion pieces. yay!