Gruber: Firewire foo, shuffle FAT
John Gruber weighs in on
the recent debate surrounding the omission of
FireWire cables from the new line of iPods. He’s not terribly concerned about this, acknowleding a smart move on the
part of Apple to stop including, and making everyone pay for, a cable that the current primary market for iPod sales —
Windows users — won’t use. But he does disapprove of several other iPod accessories that have been rendered a la
carte - the iPod Photo Dock and AV cable.
Without them, the device is “pretty much just an iPod with a color screen, rather than an iPod with extra photo-related
capabilities.” The man speaks truth.
He also brings up an interesting point about the iPod shuffle, which is that the only available disk format for the device is FAT32, with no option to reformat as HFS+. This means that a slew of “special characters” that are not terribly special (. ” / \ [ ] : ; | = ,) are now off-limits in filenames to be transferred to the iPod shuffle. Considering that most Mac users aren’t aware of this restriction, it could lead to a lot of head-scratching when transferring tracks to their new devices. Has anyone been bitten by the “one or more files could not be copied” error?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bruce McLeod said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I don't see having the iPod formatted in FAT32 is an issue at all. The first thing that I did when I got my I pod last year was to format it FAT32, so I could use it to transfer large files between PC's.
The only drama that I have has is that I cannot update the iPod software from my Titanium, I have to use a windows machine. The special characters issue should be handled by the Finder and itunes, (but I can't recall if they are).
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Tim Dorr said 3:35PM on 10-13-2005
The filename of your audio files should not matter for the iPod's filesystem if the shuffle maintains the same file layout as the HD-based iPods. All the files are moved into the iPod Control folder and renamed to some cryptic name and directory (F1234568.mp3, I believe is the format). So, the extra characters are discarded. I assume the filenames have some sort of benefit for organizing and also reduce the ease of getting the files off the iPod and onto another user's computer.
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Matthew Huie said 3:31PM on 8-01-2005
You two don't get the point. If you want to use the shuffle as a flash drive, and you are on a Mac, you may run into trouble copying files that have special characters (those listed in the article).
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F_D said 8:24AM on 7-20-2005
McLeod's right-- iTunes handles the special characters issue. Anyone who has been using an HD-based iPod with their Windows-based PC already knows this. In that instance, the drive is reformatted to the given filesystem and when sync'ing (or otherwise transferring music to the "F??" directories), renaming the files to the song title and replacing disallowed characters with an underscore. And since the file's metadata holds a copy of the song title w/ intact "?" and "*" and "" characters, no harm done.
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Graeme Hiebert said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
The article is a bit misleading. As far as I know, the only characters mentioned which are not actually allowed in a FAT32 system are /, , :, and |. (The Windows explorer might balk at others, but they are still allowable in the filesystem.)
Of these, / and : are not valid in HFS filesystems either - or rather, either / or : is disallowed, depending on what libraries your application uses.
This narrows down the contentious character set to | and . Considering that the iPod shuffle has to include programming to access the filesystem stored on the device, I would say that losing the ability to store | and is a small price to pay to keep the shuffle small and cheap.
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Steve said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I ran into this very problem recently. As an owner of a 40GB 3G iPod, and having had my hard disk on my Mac die not too long ago, I purchased a copy of iPodRip. The program allows me to easily copy files from my iPod onto my Mac. I keep a copy of the application on the iPod in case I need to use it. Just copy the application onto the Mac and then run it.
So what has this to do with a Shuffle you ask? My wife and I recently celebrated our anniversary with a pair of iPod Shuffles. The first thing I did was add a copy iPodRip to the Shuffle. Guess what? FAT32 prohibited my copying of the application because there were some resource elements in the application that would not conform to FAT32 storage.
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jdepew said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
So, since we now have to buy the photo dock, it might has well be useful. Does anyone know if it can be used with a Gen4 B&W iPod as well?
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