I want to play my iPod 24/7 as my telephone hold music. Will it hurt to leave it plugged into the AC outlet 24/7? I have the first generation 30 GB iPod.

- Ken

While you won’t damage the iPod itself by doing this, there will be an impact on the iPod battery. When connected to an external power source, the iPod runs from the external power rather than its own battery. Once the battery is fully charged, the charging circuit shuts off and the iPod simply runs from the external power source.

In this case, the battery is not being used at all, so leaving your iPod connected to external power is the equivalent of leaving it turned off on the shelf as far as the battery is concerned. This will result in the battery not being “exercised” and thereby failing earlier than it otherwise might. Apple recommends that you run your iPod through a full charge cycle from battery at least once a month to help preserve your battery life.

I have a 120 GB iPod classic that I sync with iTunes. I moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive. I transferred all my purchases back so the iPod and iTunes have the exact same content on them. I will do ANYTHING to get my play count back. The play count is still on my iPod, it just isn’t on iTunes, and iTunes keeps prompting me to erase and sync, which will delete my play count.

- Anonymous

It sounds like when you moved your iTunes library to an external hard drive you actually started a brand new iTunes library and then reimported all of your tracks to this new library, rather than using the consolidation method outlined in our iPod 201 article on Transferring your iTunes Library. If you still have the iTunes library database on your internal hard drive or backed up somewhere, your best solution would be to switch back over to the original database and then follow the steps in the above article. This would preserve all of your play counts, play lists, and other metadata since you would still be using the exact same library database and simply relocating the files.

If you don’t have a copy of your iTunes library database from your original library, then you’re going to have to go through the steps of recovering this content back from the iPod itself. There are a number of third-party tools that can do this for you, although most of these will want to copy your entire content back from your iPod and rebuild your iTunes library. Some will sync just the play counts, but this may not be completely reliable since it would require matching up tracks between disassociated libraries.

If you’re in a situation where you’re going to be forced to recover your play counts from your iPod, your best bet will be to use a tool that copies your tracks back and rebuilds your iTunes library from scratch. Our tutorial on Copying Content from your iPod to your Computer covers these solutions in much more detail.

The whole Apple ecosystem is marvelous but the iPhone/iTunes slow backup destroys the whole experience. I have a non-jailbroken iPhone 3G on 3.1.2, iTunes 9.0.2, and iMac Intel on Snow Leopard. ALL my pictures and music, iCal and Address book, and my Applications ARE already backed up to hard disk. If I cancel the backup process what are the downsides? I believe games settings, email settings, etc are lost but what else? Thanks.

- George

The backups created by iTunes include everything that is stored on your iPhone that is not already synced to your device from iTunes itself. Media content, including music, photos and videos are not normally backed up as these come from iTunes in the first place. Likewise, your applications are not backed up but their data is, which may or may not be important depending upon what sort of applications your are using. Other content that may be relevant in the backup are your device settings and any photos or videos that you have taken with the iPhone’s own camera.

A more complete list of which data is backed up can be found in Apple’s knowledgebase article, iPhone and iPod touch: About backups.

Under most circumstances, iPhone backups should not take more than a couple of minutes, so if you’re finding that your backup times are excessive, you may want to look at which applications you’re using and how much data they’re likely storing, if you’re taking a lot of photos between backups, and/or if you’re not syncing your iPhone on a regular basis. iTunes only backs up that data which has changed since the last backup, so the length of time required to make a backup will depend largely on the above factors.

Keep in mind that there’s nothing wrong with cancelling a backup in progress during a sync when you’re in a hurry. Your previous backup will still be maintained, and this will not prevent iTunes from backing up your iPhone the next time you connect it. This allows you to still retain some backups of your data, albeit perhaps not always up to the very last sync.

Hello, I was wondering when you guys were going to have a review of the Klipsch S4i? I’m debating between the S4i and the ER hf2.

- Brad

The Klipsch S4i are basically identical to the S4 which we reviewed previously. The S4i simply add a remote control and increase the price accordingly. The Etymotic hf2 are generally a better pair or earphones but have less extra bass than the S4. The hf2 were also designed for the earlier iPhone models, simply providing a one-button remote rather than the in-line volume controls of the S4i. Unless you’re using an iPhone 3GS or a recent iPod model, however, this will not be an issue, as the iPhone and iPhone 3G do not support the in-line volume controls.