iPod Shuffle with green/orange blinking lights

I'm feeling a slight sense of deja vu. Lately, I seem to spend my time and energy fixing things. It's nice on some ways, because at least I can still set things right-- but at the same time, I feel like it gets in the way of me being creative, learning new things. And yet, here I am, searching for material for a blog entry, and what comes to mind except "Maybe I should document how I got my iPod Shuffle working again after it stopped working?"

And see, the deja vu would be because a million years ago, when I first started blogging (think before Google bought Blogger, k?) the predominant topic was the fixes and workarounds I came up with to make things work properly.

No wonder no one reads my blog then. ;)

I have a first generation iPod shuffle that suddenly stopped playing songs/podcasts entirely. When you hit the controls (play, skip forward, skip back, pause, etc.) the green and orange lights blink in an alternating pattern. According to documents I found while researching this problem, it could be anything as simple as a battery in need of recharge to as dire as "the green and orange lights of death!"

No, seriously-- that's what they called it. What, you thought I made that up?

Anyways, yes, it would have been the perfect excuse to go out and buy a new iPod or other MP3 player-- but money's been a little tight lately, you know, between the bathroom renovation and Christmas. So, I figured I'd take a crack at fixing the iPod I had first.

Basically, I was able to plug it into the USB port of my iBook, and it saw the contents of the music partition as well as the contents of the data partition. (I have my iPod shuffle "split" for Disk Mode so it can store files and documents, like a traditional USB thumbdrive.) I was able to copy all my files off of the iPod in the Finder, and then reinitialized it from within iTunes.

In addition to warning me that I'd lose all the files and media, it also (after I told it to proceed) reapplied the iPod firmware update. I typed in the "new" name for my iPod Shuffle-- which I set to my phone number, just in case I ever lose the darn thing. I decided not to activate Disk Mode at this time, and just let it store music. I copied two MP3 files across from within iTunes, plugged in my earphones, hit the play button-- and everything worked just fine.