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Listening to your iPod whilst it is charging

One day I was sitting at my laptop happily chatting on MSN and listening to a new CD on my iPod nano. Looking down to rewind a track or two, I noticed that the battery was pretty low.

"No problem," I thought "I'll just plug it into the laptop to charge it up." Of course when I did that it stopped playing and iTunes appeared which isn't what I wanted. I could have just listened to the music using iTunes its self, but that's not the point - and in my opinion iTunes sucks, but that's a story for another day...

Anyway after some messing about I found a simple way to just get iTunes to eventually go away and let me listen to my iPod whilst it was charging. I've got no idea if this works with anything other than a standard iPod nano using USB - I suspect it will be fine for all iPods and if they are using USB or Firewire but there is no way I can tell for sure. And for that matter I am not sure if this works on Windows XP and Mac OS X. If you try it with another iPod model or on a Mac, please leave a comment and let others know if it works! So - please follow this at your own risk!

How to charge your iPod and listen at the same time

1. Plug in your iPod as usual and wait for iTunes to slowly lurch into life.
2. Whilst you are doing so, your iPod should be showing the "Do not disconnect" screen with the flashing red circle.
3. Once iTunes has finally loaded all you need to do is click on the eject button for your iPod. This will appear next to your iPod's name in the "Source" part of the iTunes interface, or at the bottom right of the iTunes window when the iPod is selected. If you've not got your iPod selected, it will just eject your CD so make sure you get the right one!
4. Having clicked eject, iTunes will do something that causes it to lockup for somewhere between 20 and 60 seconds, and then return to your main Library
5. If you now look at your iPod, it will be back to the usual main menu, but now it will be charging from USB too
6. Now just use your iPod as usual to listen whilst you are charging!

It seems like USB can provide more than enough current to allow you to listen and charge the battery at the same time too. It seems to be drawing 500mA irrespective of if its charged, charging, charging and playing, or charged and playing - I'm not sure if that is just Windows being silly or if it really does draw that much current.

Getting iTunes to recognise your iPod again

If you want to get iTunes to recognise your iPod again whilst you are listening to it and it is charging then there are two things you can do.

1. If you have exited iTunes, just start it up again (go to the start menu, go to the "Run..." item, then type in "itunes" and press "Ok").
2. If you have not exited iTunes, you can either exit iTunes and start it up again (as described above), or you can just unplug the iPod at either end for a second, then plug it back in again.

I personally prefer just unplugging the USB end as the iPod dock connectors are pretty fragile and awkward to disconnect from iPod nanos, whereas with USB you can be fairly heavy handed and yank it out. I guess if you don't have an nice easily reachable USB port (i.e. its at the back of your computer) you'll want to use the iPod end.

Back 17.07.2006.