2G iPod Shuffle problems

Executive summary

If you’re having trouble with a 2G iPod Shuffle not being properly recognized by your operating system, try connecting via an external powered USB hub. Symptoms may include unsafe removal of device messages on Windows.

Verbose version

My commuting rig is great: a lovely 2001 Roberts bike with Campagnolo Veloce bits, Lumicycle lights and a Rapha hat, amongst other bits and pieces. I’m not really a sucker for brand names, but I do appreciate quality kit when it counts, and on a daily commuting run in all weathers, it pays to have quality stuff. It’s only let down by the average quality 1970s-vintage legs and cardiovascular system providing the motive power.

I’d never envied my car-driving fellow road users their heating and their roofs, but I missed not having music on the bike.

Santa brought me a second-generation (2G) iPod Shuffle this Christmas: thanks mate. This thing is ideal to supply on-bike-entertainment: it weighs approximately nothing (15g) and takes up roughly no space, yet holds about 200 songs at 160kbps. I clip it onto the waistband of my trousers and cannot tell if it is there or not.

This is the best-designed player I’ve seen for this type of application. It is tiny; light; has no moving parts; tough (although watch that clip when sitting down); the buttons are easy to press accurately with thick gloves on; it has sufficient storage; and it’s not so expensive that writing it off in a fall or via some other means would be a total catastrophe.

I used the supplied in-ear headphones on the first ride, but these were rubbish. The shape generated more wind noise than no headphones, and it is impossible to position them to the level of accuracy required whilst wearing winter gloves. The acoustic problems rule them out on safety grounds: I want to be able to hear traffic just as well as without the headphones. I knew this was possible from trips a decade ago, with over-the-ear phones and a Sony cassette walkman.

Using a pair of light over-the-ear phones (Sony MDR-G52 wrap-around type) was much better. These provide isolation from wind noise, rather than exacerbating it (and a bit of warmth as well!). I can then replace the eliminated wind noise with music, and still hear the traffic just as well as without the headphones, so long as I go easy on the volume. I can certainly hear better than car drivers inside closed cars: road noise and sirens are totally unaffected.

This is great: I cruised home in the dark tonight listening to the likes of Jack Johnson and Satellite Soul. A mournful, yearning song from the Stoneleigh Bible Week CD series matched my mood up the hill, with a triumphant Return of the Mack by Mark Morrison at the top (don’t read any theology into that!). Trying to maintain my own pedalling cadence was tricky with the irrepressible groove of the rhythm section on Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean in my ears.

Anyway, on with the subject matter. I’d initially tried the Shuffle out with our HP laptop running WinXP and iTunes, and everything worked fine. My plan was then to use Banshee on our “spare” PC running Debian Linux behind the TV: it had a 120GB disk and wasn’t really doing much. I installed a USB 2.0 PCI card into this 2001-vintage 1GHz Athlon machine, installed the necessary software, and popped the Shuffle into its dock. Nothing happened, save for a forlorn orange LED quietly blinking on the Shuffle.

After a bit of research into the logs and dmesg, I found that the system was occasionally recognizing and mounting the Shuffle, but a USB disconnect event kicked it off within a second or so. A search of the web found someone else with a similar problem, unable to solve it, but with guesses that the non-standard sector size may be the issue. I wondered if the 2G Shuffle did something proprietary, and the Linux crew haven’t yet caught up with it? That was my theorem…

Five hours later, having put Windows 2000 on the machine instead (how long to format a 120GB disk as NTFS?! how many Windows updates since Win2k launch?!), I had iTunes installed. Pop the Shuffle into the dock, and… several million “Unsafe removal of device” USB messages! Bother.

To cut a long story less long, I eventually found that the thing would work perfectly when connected to the PC through an external powered USB hub. I guess that the Shuffle’s power requirements to charge the battery are too much for the cheap USB card in the machine, and cause the connection to fail. Other people on various Apple fora have mentioned similar symptoms, such as connecting a Shuffle causing all other USB devices to disconnect. I needn’t have replaced a good OS with a less good one after all, although Google Earth and Picasa are better on Windows (hardware 3D and DNG support respectively).