Gruber: Firewire foo, shuffle FAT

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).