The iPod Classic range is one of the best music players back in the day but even now they are far from obsolete. Personally I went for the iPod Video (5th gen) due to the wolfson DAC within, with its great audio quality and warm sound signature however all models are relatively easy to mod and hack. With this project i focused on functionality and aesthetics.
Storage
The main current day limitation with the iPod was the revolutionary disk drive. Thanks to the iFlash board, you can use SD cards instead which not only increases capacity but also reduces battery drain, increased read write speeds and it’s silent as well!
Operating System
Another downside with the iPod was the 30GB model has a track limit of around about 20,000 songs and the 80GB model around about 40,000 songs when using the original os. A convenient workaround is using rockbox with other enhancements including support for pretty much all codecs, lossy (eg .mp3) and lossless (eg .flac), advanced sound settings, applications and utilities. Personally the best thing about rockbox besides the endless theming possibilities is not needing to use iTunes besides the initial iFlash setup.
Mod list
- Custom shell
- Custom back piece
- Higher battery capacity
- SD card based storage
- Rockbox
- Bluetooth