I just spent the last couple hours in a skirmish with my 160GB classic and iTunes 8 on my mac. I'm not one of those people who obsessively searches for the happy in every pile of shit, but I do feel like I learned something useful on this one.

If you've ever scoured the file structure on your iPod then you'll know that there is a hidden directory called iPod_Control where iTunes places all your media files. These files are split up into a series of F## folders and given ambiguous names like JFUD.mp3.

Well my little debacle tonight led me to the conclusion that files specifically named AAAA.*, AAAA 1.*, AAAA 2.* etc. have significance. That is, they are wasting your precious drive space. Now I haven't tested this theory on any other iPod or in any other situation, but here's how it went...

iTunes 8 was causing me trouble in a variety of ways. One was a computer authorization issue that I don't think had anything to do with this tale. The other issue was syncing problems with my iPod. I store lots of movies and TV shows on my iPod and tonight I wanted to copy over Apocalypto and Primer. To my dismay I was out of space, something had to go. Oh look, the girlfriend's boring chick movies that she wanted me to put on there and then she never watched them. DELETE. OK, space acquired... Copy up my mp4 files, looks good... Eject the iPod, make sure they show up in the movies list... Damn. They aren't there. Hooked it back up and checked the movie list in iTunes, now the three chick movies are back and no Mel Gibson or brilliant indies. WTF? Try again, delete the movies, this time just upload Primer since its a much smaller file... Same thing. So after some time of alternating between futile googling, unhelpful Apple support pages and the rebooting of all involved devices and software I got the thing to start working right again. Or so I thought.

I copied up Primer and everything went just fine. Girly movies gone and entrepreneurial time-travel present and accounted for. Then I tried to sync my podcasts since I'm a bit behind on The Onion and I hit a new roadblock: Disk Is Full. My "Other" file types were taking up a full 5.5 GB of disk space. I've had these mystery files (and by mystery I mean album art and crap like that) take a few hundred MB before but this is just stupid. I'm sure its those blasted chick movies that just won't give up and DIE! So I open up Omni DiskSweeper and scan away. Nothings hiding in the trash or anywhere else, its all in the F## folders. I'm guessing that iTunes just removed the references to the video files and couldn't delete them, so I went through checking everything over 1GB. It turned out that there was not one, but three copies of Primer on the iPod, though it was only listed once. This is where I noticed that although the three files were in three different directories, one was named some combination of random letters but the other two were both called AAAA.mp4. Suspicious, I went looking for more AAAA files, and found many. There was an AAAA.mp4 that was the lost Apocalypto file, a BSG episode that I had tried to upload during the whole thing, as well as a ton of Doyle Redland reporting from my many unsuccessful attempts.

Realizing that this was an iPod restore or not-restore situation and being that I couldn't specifically remember ever being wrong, I deleted all files in the F## folders that began with AAAA. I am now happy to report that my iPod is back to its normal level of "Other" file space, devoid of chick flicks, brimming with the talent of Carruth and teeming with questionable Cylon mind games.

Me: 1, iPod: 0