iLounge

Q: What are the best speakers to use with my iPod? (15, 76-79, and 90-92)

Q: What are the best headphones to use with my iPod? (10, 72-75, and 90-92)

Q: I really want to get a nice case for my iPod. Do you have any suggestions? (36-37, 54-67, and 90-92)

Q: How can I connect my iPod to my car stereo? (14, 32-35, 68-71, and 90-92)

Q: Are there any batteries that I can use to extend my iPod's battery life? (82-83 and 90-92)

A: Answers to these and many other questions can be found in two places. Our Free iPod Book 3.3 provides a complete report card to all of the iPod accessories we've reviewed as of summer 2007, as well as over 125 iTunes and iPod tips & tricks. Further, our new 2008 iPod & iPhone Buyers' Guide has accessory tutorials at the page numbers listed in parentheses above. These and other publications in our Library are free downloads, developed by the editors of iLounge!

Q: I may buy an iPod touch and I’d like to know how it works in regards to the charger. I currently have a 20GB iRiver that connects to the stereo to listen to music and that I connect to the provided AC adapter. The battery, when charged, is not in use when the electricity runs through it...which is ideal when listening to 2-3 hours a day of music in the living room. I was therefore wondering how the iPod and charger works. Is the battery cycle being used or not when the battery is full and the iPod working with the AC adapter/electricity?

Further, if I disconnect and reconnect the iPod in the charger/power adapter a few times over a period of several hours (ie, to switch between home sound system and personal/headphone use), how does this affect my battery life?

- Pascal

A: There are a number of misunderstandings about how rechargeable batteries work in most modern electronic devices, most likely caused by some significant advances in battery technology over the years.

The first and most important consideration is that the majority of modern electronic devices with rechargeable batteries now use “Lithium Ion” batteries (Li-ion). Unlike earlier generations of rechargeable batteries which were based on Nickel Cadmium (NiCad) or Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH), Lithium Ion batteries do not suffer from the “memory effect” when it comes to recharging. Previous Nickel-based rechargeable batteries, particularly NiCad batteries, would lose their maximum charge capacity if they were not fully discharged prior to charging them up.

Li-ion batteries, on the other hand, actually prefer to be topped up, and should never be completely discharged, as this will actually destroy the battery. Most electronic devices, including the iPod, have a cut-off circuit that turns the device off when the battery drops critically low in order to prevent this from happening, thereby leaving a small charge in the battery, so this is rarely a practical concern for an end user.

Likewise, while lithium-ion batteries can technically experience problems from overcharging (continuing to charge the device after the battery is fully charged), any properly-designed electronic device will incorporate a “cut-off” circuit to stop charging the battery once it’s reached its full charge level in order to prevent this.

Another point to note is that there is no requirement for a lithium-ion battery to be “primed” before use. Recommendations that a new iPod be plugged in and charged overnight before using it for the first-time are based on older nickel-based battery technology. For a Li-ion battery, there is no difference between the first charge, the tenth charge, or the 100th charge.

The life expectancy of a lithium ion battery in terms of how many charges it will take is measured in “charge cycles” which refers to the number of complete discharge and recharge cycles, not simply to the number of times the battery is “topped up.” Therefore, if you drain your battery by 25% and recharge it fully four times, this will count as a single charge cycle. Again, there is rarely a reason for the average iPod user to be worry about watching the charge level or being concerned about reaching a certain level before recharging—simply dropping the iPod into the charger whenever necessary is fine.

In fact, the only reason in the case of an iPod for doing a complete discharge and recharge of an iPod is to re-calibrate the battery meter itself (ie, the iPod’s display of how much power is remaining). This has no impact on the actual battery life, but will help the iPod provide a better estimation of the remaining life for the user by ensuring the battery gauge is accurate.

In terms of how the charging process itself works, Li-ion batteries charge in two stages: If the battery is below approximately 70-75% charge level, the fist stage involves applying full charging power to get the battery charge up to that level. Once the battery reaches the 70-75% level, a “topping” charge is applied, whereby the current to the battery is gradually decreased as the battery capacity reaches 100%. This is done in order to avoid overcharging, and is sometimes referred to as a “trickle” charge, although this is technically incorrect by definition, since a “trickle charge” refers to continuous power being applied to a battery once it has reached full charge, which Li-ion batteries do not do, again in order to avoid the risk of overcharging.

With a Li-ion battery, once full charge has been reached, the charging circuit will shut off completely and stop providing any charge to the battery. At this point, as long as the device remains connected to external power, the battery goes dormant and the device simply runs from the external power source. What this means for the iPod is that as soon as you see the “Plug” icon on the battery indicator, charging power has been cut-off and the device is simply running from the external power source.

If you leave the iPod connected to an external power source for long enough, the battery will drop slightly in power just from normal energy loss (in the same way that it would if it were simply sitting on a shelf turned off). Once the battery falls below a certain level, a topping charge will be reapplied to bring it back to full, but this normally happens very infrequently as long as the device remains connected to external power—possibly as rarely as only once every three to four weeks.

Disconnecting the iPod from external power and reconnecting it will re-initiate the charge circuit, since the battery level needs to be re-checked, and a small topping charge may need to be applied to get back to 100%, but unless the device has been used on battery, the iPod should return to the plug icon within a few minutes, once again indicating that the battery is fully charged and the device is running from AC power. In many cases no topping charge is applied, and this delay is just the time it takes for the iPod to resolve that the battery is, in fact, fully charged.

The net effect of disconnecting and reconnecting your iPod from its dock should be basically neutral in terms of battery life. The topping charge is applied only to bring the battery back to 100%, so this is a fraction of a battery cycle in the same way as any other charge.

Unfortunately, many of the now-outdated issues with nickel-based batteries have become urban myths for modern electronic devices, and can cause many iPod owners much completely unwarranted angst about their device and their battery life. In reality it is almost never necessary for a typical iPod user to worry much about the iPod battery… The simple rule of thumb is to use the device as you normally would, charge it when it needs it, and don’t worry too much about leaving it on the charger for reasonable periods of time.

In fact, just about the only issue to be aware of is for those rare users who use their iPod from external power all the time. In this case, since the Li-ion battery is not being used (the device is running from external power), the battery itself doesn’t get properly “exercised” and this can decrease the battery life over time. This is only an issue for users who almost never run their iPod from the battery. Apple’s own support site simply suggests that the battery be put through at least one complete charge cycle per month. Considering that even twenty 5% “top-up” charges still counts as a charge cycle, the reality is that for the vast majority of iPod users, normal everyday use will easily take care of this.

Q: I have an iPod mini which stopped playing stereo sound from the headphone jack. I know for sure this is a hardware problem on the iPod itself. Would the Apple FM Radio Remote allow me to listen in stereo again since the problem seems to be the physical headphone jack?  I know this remote is not supposed to be compatible with the Mini, but I don’t care about the radio feature. Could just the headphone through the dock connector feature work for my needs?

- Muhammad

A: While the Apple FM Radio Remote will technically work simply as a remote control and pass-through headphone adapter with older model iPods, in our own testing with an iPod mini we experienced extremely distorted audio to the point of being unlistenable even through stock Apple earbuds.  Although the volume control and other remote control functions work as expected (with the obvious exception of the FM radio function), the audio quality was so significantly degraded that this isn’t a practical solution.  While it’s possible that this issue is isolated to our test unit, the fact that this both components work properly otherwise implies that there are level incompatibilities between the remote and the iPod, most likely caused by the fact that older iPods cannot properly communicate volume levels with the remote.

The problem is basically that the iPod Dock Connector port provides a fixed-level audio output (sometimes referred to as “line-out"). The volume controls on the iPod itself only control the headphone output, not the output through the Dock Connector port.  With the fifth-generation and later model iPods, compatible accessories could read the volume adjustments from the iPod and adjust their own volume accordingly, but the iPod itself still produced a fixed-level output—it was up to the accessory to adjust its own volume based on what it determined the iPod’s volume setting to be.

For this same reason, volume adjustments made on the iPod mini will not affect the volume level through the remote—you would have to adjust the volume directly on the remote itself. However, at any volume level setting, our own testing revealed the audio to be extremely distorted.

Note that there are other accessories available, such as the SendStation PocketDock, that do provide a line-out connection, however this is a fixed-level audio output, and would not be acceptable to use for connecting headphones/earphones, as the line levels would be too high and would damage most earphones. We therefore do not recommend using these accessories to connect normal earphones/headphones to.

Q: Every time I plug my iPod into my new laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate to sync with iTunes, a Windows box pops up that says “Do you want to scan and fix 80GB ( G: )? There might be a problem with some files on this device or disc. This can happen if you remove the device or disc before all files have been written to it.”

The box gives me the options to either scan and fix the iPod or to continue without scanning. I always pick “Continue without scanning.” Should I pick “scan and fix” instead? What will this do? Is there a way to prevent this box from always popping up whenever I plug in my iPod?

- Ron

A: This is a known problem for many users of traditional iPod models on Windows Vista. This is caused by the fact that as far as Windows is concerned, your iPod is just another removable hard drive on your computer (in fact, this is how iTunes itself actually reads and writes data to the iPod—it just accesses it as a drive letter to update files and database entries on the iPod). Note that this would not be a problem in the case of the iPod touch or iPhone, as these devices use a different synchronization protocol that does not rely on the iPod appearing as an external hard drive.

What is specifically happening here is that something on Windows Vista has flagged the file-system on the iPod as needing to be checked (this is sometimes referred to as setting the “dirty bit” in the file system). When you connect your iPod, Windows Vista sees this flag and prompts you to run a repair on the external drive just to make sure that everything is in order.

The most common cause for this flag to be set is if the iPod is disconnected from the computer without being properly ejected first. Since Windows can’t be certain that it finished writing to the device properly, it marks it as needing to be checked the next time it is connected.

Most of the time, this doesn’t mean that there actually is a problem with the iPod, merely that Windows wants to scan it just to make sure everything is okay. In this case, selecting “Scan and Fix” shouldn’t cause any problems unless there actually are underlying file system problems, in which case it would attempt to fix them. In either case, it should also reset the flag that indicates that a scan is required. That having been said, however, the “Scan and Fix” option performs more steps than may strictly be necessary if we’re just dealing with a flag being set to require a check on the iPod, since “Scan and Fix” will also scan the entire iPod for bad sectors—a much more time-consuming process.

A faster way to perform a quick file-system check and reset the flag is to go to a command prompt, and simply type in:

CHKDSK G: /f

(where G: is the drive letter assigned to your iPod, as noted in the “Scan and Fix” dialog box).

If there actually are file-system problems, the CHKDSK command will report them and attempt to fix them as well, but it’s more likely that it will simply report that no problems have been found, but also reset the dirty bit in the process.

Note that if there are file-system problems on the iPod, selecting “Scan and Fix” might result in data becoming lost on the iPod or other corruption occurring as a result of the process. While this shouldn’t happen under normal repair circumstances, there have been reports that this has in fact caused problems. As long as you’re using automatic sync, however, and have your music in your iTunes library, this would be little more than a minor inconvenience, as you can always just restore and reload the iPod from iTunes.

Note that if you do not have a backup of your music anywhere else, then you should backup the content from your iPod prior to attempting any repairs, just to ensure that you don’t have any problems.

You should also ensure that you are running the latest support pack version of Windows Vista before proceeding with any further action, however, since early Vista releases had some known issues with regards to iPod support that were fixed in subsequent patches. If you’re using automatic update in Windows, and/or if you have Vista SP1, this should not be a concern. Many of the problems that have been reported with regard to iPod corruption and Windows Vista were caused by these earlier compatibility problems.

Q: Whenever I reinstall Windows, and iTunes, I cannot seem to find a way to reimport my podcasts into iTunes. I have them stored in the same default iTunes folder under podcasts, but iTunes will not add them to its list. Nor does iTunes recognize that I already have certain podcasts; iTunes downloads them again unless I clear the titles from the subscription listing. Can you help me find a solution? Thank you very much in advance!

- Peter

A: Unfortunately, podcasts imported directly into iTunes from the file system are not catalogued properly by iTunes itself. Only podcasts that you subscribe to, which are downloaded directly by iTunes, are listed in the “Podcast” section.

More recent versions of iTunes have made this problem slightly more complicated as well, in that podcasts do not appear in the Music section of iTunes either, resulting in “lost” entries that are in your database that are difficult to find within iTunes. Some devices which read the entire library from the database, such as the Apple TV 2.0, will reveal these, and you can also search for them with smart playlists (simply use a criteria of “Podcast is true").

Specifically to your problem, however, the real issue is that you are likely creating a brand new iTunes database and reimporting your entire library even though this is not strictly necessary. Not only does this result in the loss of podcast information, but other metadata such as ratings, play counts, and your playlists are also going to be lost in the process.

If you simply backup your iTunes library database before reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows, then you can restore this file back to its original location, and iTunes will use your original database and you will pretty much be working right where you left off before reinstalling Windows. You may need to reset some of your iTunes preferences, but the library metadata and organization will be preserved.

Regardless of where you store your actual media files, the iTunes library database lives by default in an “iTunes” sub-folder under your “My Music” folder for the current Windows user. The critical file here is the “iTunes Library.itl” file, although we recommend backing up the entire folder, since there is other useful information in here as well, such as the album artwork cache, and any iPod Games that you may have purchased.

You can relocated this library onto a different drive as well, but this is a separate process from setting the path for the actual music folder (where your media is stored). For more information, see our tutorial on Managing your iTunes Library on an External Hard Drive.

Q: I want to import some music from an external hard drive into my iTunes library. I have been able to import songs one at a time. Is there a way to import multiple songs at once? Also, how about importing an album? Also, I cannot get my first-generation iPod nano to turn on. I have tried to reset it with no luck. It wasn’t used for an extended period of time. I do not want to restore it until I have my library updated. Could my problem be that the battery fully discharged? Will my music be lost?

- Pam

A: In answer to your first question, there have been a number of bugs through various versions of iTunes on Windows with regards to the “Add File To Library” menu option—some versions would allow any number of files to be selected, others only allow a single file at a time, while still other versions have some other limit in between.

In reality, however, the simplest way to add content to iTunes is to actually not even bother with the menu options. Instead, simply open a Windows Explorer window alongside your iTunes window, select whichever files you want to add, and then drag and drop them straight into the iTunes window using the mouse. Provided the files are in a format compatible with iTunes, it will import all of the selected files based on your current preferences (specifically, the files will be copied into the iTunes Music Folder or referenced from their original location, depending on the setting of the “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” option in your iTunes preferences).

With regard to your second question, it is very likely that if you have not used your iPod for an extended period of time that the battery has been depleted. Even though the device has been off, some small amount of power is still used, and the lithium ion batteries themselves will normally lose voltage over time even from doing nothing.

In this situation, connecting the iPod to a power source, such as an external charger or your computer’s USB port should bring it back to life and begin charging it. Note, however, that in the case of a completely depleted battery, it may sometimes take up to 10 minutes after you plug the iPod in before you actually see it come to life.

Note that completely draining the battery on an iPod does not result in the loss of any of the actual media content on the device. At the most, on some models the actual user preferences (ie, the options found under “Settings” on the iPod menu) may be reset after the battery is completely drained, but the actual music and other media content is stored on non-volatile flash memory or on a hard drive, which do not require power to retain their content.

Q: Due to my PC being fairly old and iTunes’ rather heavy reliance on resources, I tend to use iTunes primarily for managing my library/syncing my iPod, and a simpler application for playback when I’m working at the PC. However, I keep running into a problem with changes that I make to a song in iTunes (like genre or year changes) not taking effect when I play the file using a different application or when I load songs onto a different brand MP3 player.

I always assumed that when you use the ‘Get Info’ option to modify the information about a song, iTunes made the changes not only to its database, but also to the tag within the specific MP3 file itself; but this doesn’t always seem to be the case.

Are there certain fields within an audio file’s tag that iTunes will not change, or do I have something set incorrectly?

- Rachel

A: Your assumption that iTunes should update the ID3 tags within the media files themselves is absolutely correct. Unfortunately, however, there are some factors that can prevent this from working as it should.

This problem occurs most commonly with MP3 files, and is often the result of either corrupted ID3 tags, or simply the fact that the files are using an older version of the ID3 tag standard, known as ID3v1 tags (ie, version 1).

ID3v1 tags stored a very limited amount of data in a fixed-length format, and made no provisions for extended information such as album artwork or any of the more advanced metadata in iTunes (ie, album artist, disc number, grouping, composer, etc).

Compatibility with ID3v1 tags was further complicated as many programs adopted their own (often-incompatible) standards for encoding this additional metadata into the file using the ID3v1.1 format, which allowed for some basic extensions to the ID3 data area.

While iTunes is normally supposed to update whatever tags are already in the file, we have observed problems working with ID3v1.1 tags over the years, most frequently due to this additional non-standard data that may have been added by other applications which may have touched the files in the past.

You can check which version of ID3 tag is contained in the file and being used by iTunes simply by viewing a track’s properties. Select an MP3 track, and choose File, Get Info from the iTunes menu, and check the “Summary” tab:

Note that an MP3 file can have both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags contained within it. iTunes will normally use the latest version of the tags it finds to populate the information in its database, although it will try to update both versions. However, iTunes does not attempt to rewrite the entire tag header—it merely updates those fields that it finds within the tag.

The simplest way to fix this issue is to convert the ID3 tags within your MP3 files to the newer ID3v2 standard. There are several sub-versions of this, but you should generally use ID3v2.4 (the latest) provided your other applications support it, which almost all modern MP3 playback and management applications should. Even if you find that your tracks already have ID3v2 tags, the conversion process forces iTunes to rewrite the tags in full, which will often fix any issues of corruption or non-standard attributes that may be causing problems.

iTunes can facilitate this conversion for you, simply by selecting the tracks within iTunes, and choosing Convert ID3 Tags... from the Advanced menu:

This will present a dialog box of conversion options:

Simply check off “ID3 Tag Version” and choose the appropriate version from the drop-down menu and click OK. iTunes will go through the selected tracks and convert all ID3 tags to the selected version, cleaning up and normalizing them in the process.

You can find out more information about the ID3 tagging standard at http://www.id3.org.

Ask iLounge Archives:

5-9-08: About iPod battery life and charging, Using Apple FM Radio remote on older iPod models, Scan and Fix dialog using iPod on Windows Vista, Preserving iTunes metadata when reinstalling Windows, Importing multiple tracks into iTunes, About iTunes and ID3 tags

5-2-08: Transferring digital camera movies to iPod, Reordering and shuffling playlists, Transferring playlists between iTunes libraries, Importing audiobooks, Correcting tags on CD import, Burning CDs with longer gaps

4-25-08: Finding Duplicates in iTunes, Setting files to open in iTunes automatically, Resetting authorizations, 1G iPod nano and voice recording, Syncing a library larger than your iPod capacity, Grouping multi-disc albums

4-17-08: Ripping CDs to external hard drive, Zeppelin speakers and USB port, Bluetooth stereo on iPhone, Converting TV shows to iPod, Audio recording on iPod touch, Wireless security on iPod touch

4-10-08: Transferring LPs to iTunes, Movie Rentals and 5G iPod, New iPod models on older Macs, Maintaining Playback Position on iPod, Importing CDs on multiple computers

See the rest of the Archives...