Getting Music On To An iPod

So it’s 2025 but you, along with an ever-growing group of people have decided to dig your old iPod out and give it a new lease on life. but you may be asking yourself, how do you do this, given that iTunes no longer really exists on modern macs and how do things work with Apple Music and so on.

There are answers and solutions to all of these questions, which I’m happy to explain but, if you are not interested in all of that and you want to just put music onto your iPod NOW.

TLDR: Just Give Me the Music Now!

Then the TLDR version is to use an application called Waltr 2

That’s it. You launch the app, connect your iPod and then drag your music onto the application and it will transfer it to the iPod. Done.

They have a newer version of the app called Waltr Pro that I haven’t tried yet but I assume it works the same.

The Longer Version

There are other ways to do this, most macs (but it seems to work better the older the mac is and thus the closer it is in age to the iPod) will still see the iPod if you plug it in.

In more modern Macs, the iPod shows up in the Finder. It doesn’t always seem to connect correctly though and won’t allow you to transfer music to it (at least in my experience with an M1 Mac).

I have a 2015 Macbook Pro and there it can see my iPod and offers me the possibility to transfer songs (sync songs) via the Finder.

I also have a unibody Mac, that still runs iTunes and there things seem to work as they did in the past, with the exception that the iTunes store doesn’t work anymore.

So although those methods above all work to varying degrees, theres no way, that I’m aware of, to buy new music and have it download directly to your iPod.

How Do I Get New Music?

This depends on the service that you’re using, be it Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal etc. I strongly suggest that you look for an online store before trying anything I mention here to ensure that Artists are paid and you legally own your music.

However there are ways to download your play lists. All of the above services offer methods in-app to download a playlist or album for offline listening but this is restricted to the device you downloaded it on. It won’t work on your iPod.

If you want it to work on your iPod, then you need to look at something like DRMare, they offer products that are compatible with all of the online services and will transfer the music to your iPod for you.

This is probably the easiest method that I’m aware of today.

The Extremely Convoluted Version

Another way to do it, speaking theoretically of course, would be to write a script (or ask an AI to do it), that would pull all of the songs you have in a particular playlist from the relevant music service that you use. You could then pass that list of titles, to another script that would drop those titles into Youtube, find them for you and add download links to an application like Downie, which would then acquire those songs, drop them into Permute to convert into whatever format you want and then finally pass them onto Waltr for transfer.

Probably only something for sadists or desperate people though.

Why Do All Of This???

Most people are probably asking why would you do all of this though, when you can just listen on your phone, laptop etc. A perfectly valid question but I shall attempt to explain why, as there are multiple reasons I believe, so not in any kind of order, here they are;

Distraction Free Listening

The iPod offers truly free distraction listening, it’s not just about notifications though, you can also disable those on your devices. It’s about the fact that the only thing I can really do with an iPod is listen to it, there’s no social media or anything else to pull you and your attention away. It’s just you and your music, which in the internet age of information bombardment is probably a good thing?

Battery Life

The battery (if you install a new one anyway), lasts longer on the iPod than a phone, so you can carry it around with you for days without needing to charge.

Ownership of your music

The music on your ipod, providing of course you transferred it over from CD’s etc that you paid for, belongs to you. It’s on your iPod where a large corporation is unable to reach out and do something to it. So there is no chance that a song will suddenly become unavailable in your region, or a version with updated lyrics will replace the original. And of course, it can always be accessed without the internet.

I think that those are three solid reasons there. There are many more but I think that if you’re reading this, I don’t need to convince you and you’re just wondering more about how to transfer your music and I hope I’ve covered that above.