New Music from an Old iPod

Guts of an iPod: The cord on top with the white tip is DiMauro's invention. It allows the pod to be charged without a battery. The black rectangle is the battery (note: the connector has the same shape as the end of DiMauro's cable). The blue rectangle is the sheath that protects the iPod's hard drive. The copper-colored cable that connects both halves of the pod is sensitive... and important to watch out for.  Laura Silver

Hacking Your iPod

1. Get an old iPod.
Ideally something circa 2003, generation 3 or 4 preferred. Steiner put out a call on Craig's List and heard back from the Manhattan's Lower East Side Recycling Center, which was collecting donations of resuscitation-worthy electronics. I got a 3rd-generation pod to bring to Steiner's workshop, but it was a 3rd-generation video iPod. Oops. According to Steiner and other hacksperts, newer, svelter models are nearly hackproof. Luckily, several online guides show the lineup of the full pod genealogy. I like this one for its photos of the handsome forebears and their descendants.

2. Pry it open.
This requires some finesse and patience, and ideally, some experience extracting the meat from hard-shell crabs, or urging a bike tire from its rim. But you can't just jimmy the whole thing open in one go. Each of the long sides of the top of the iPod needs to be pulled apart from the bottom individually. Don't fear: specially made tools are available. The replacement battery I bought for my gen-3 iPod came with plastic green dissecting tools, but Steiner swears by slender black plastic instruments that he saw in a YouTube video. His hacking kit also includes dental instruments. You never know.

3. Make sure the thing works.
Test the iPod's hard drive (it's encased in a blue plastic sheath) by plugging the iPod into a power source. DiMauro spliced a battery hook-up onto power cable. But you can also plug the pod into your computer.

Gen-3 resuscitators, beware: Steiner and DiMauro recently discovered that gen-3 pods (the one with the four buttons above the scroll wheel) need to be powered via a Firewire, not USB, connection. That bit of insight solved the problem that stopped my pod dead in its tracks on Day 1 (and Days 2 through 7) of the attempted hackectomy: The pod seemed to hold a charge, but after hours of being plugged in, the screen displayed only an exclamation point and half-charged battery symbol.

4. Put in some patience.
Huck not thy object of hacking if it doesn't work at first. For me, the second try was a charm. Of course, Steiner and DiMauro were doing most of the troubleshooting. I brought wonderment, cluelessness and chocolate chip cookies (In the spirit of open source, I'll share the recipe: a log of Pillsbury pre-made cookie dough).

5. Download ipodLinux.
It's easier on a PC. Instructions are trickier for a Mac, but Steiner's working on changing that, too. Here's his cheat sheet.

6. Download PureData for iPod (pdPod)
The handy-dandy download comes with a few demo files that simulate an electronic drum kit, that, yes, you can hold in the palm of your hand. The pdPod application is what lets you make music on your pod while you're walking around. Steiner modified the Pd patch to change the look of the screen. And he swapped out one of the existing sounds with one of his own.

7. Bang on your iPod all day.

The proper hand position for performing a podectomy:  Laura Silver