iPod

After being bedeviled with disk problems on my FAT formatted 5th Generation Video iPod I put together a script to checksum (cksum) the drive and compare against the checksum of the music files on my local laptop. In reality, the this script can be used to check any two drives and it is not mandatory one of them needs to be an iPod drive. All the other examples of this sort of script on the Internet I found had one basic problem - they all only checked one directory, whilst I had a tree structure under my ~/Music directory.

Over the years I have become more and more disillusioned with .mp3 and .AAC (iTunes) files. They both use lossy compression and the reasons for their existence are now creeping into doubt. Their high compression ratios enabled quick downloads and used up little disk space. Both are coming increasingly less relevant with the development of ultra-cheap hard disk drives and fast Internet connections. However, if you want to use lossless compression with your sound files by using a codec such as FLAC or OGG Vorbis, then you are out of luck if you use the proprietary iTunes software on your iPod.