Not long ago I “upgraded” the firmware on my iPod to iOS5, audio books (m4b) would no longer play. There seems to be no way back to iOS4, I didn’t back-up the phone before the “upgrade”.

I tried a clean re-install but still no joy.

I hoped that the latest release 5.1.1 would fix the above bug but it dosn’t. Worse still I now cannot play any m4a format songs on the iPod, which I ripped from CDs that I bought. I can see them, they refuse to play (just like the m4b files mentioned before). I re-encoded the songs to mp3 but these files will not sync across to the ipod at all, all other mp3 files are no problem, just not the ones I re-encoded!!!

WTF is going on? and WHY won’t they let me downgrade back to a version of the firmware that worked??? They broke my iPod which I paid for and offer me no solution. I will never give any more money to Apple, and don’t get me started on the steaming pile of cr_p iTunes software.

My attempt to jailbreak and restore a downloaded backup of ios4 resulted in me bricking the device and having to reinstall ios5 in recovery mode.

Seriously – if anyone can give me worthwhile advice about this I will be be most grateful.

Have you tried going to an apple store and have them sort it out ?

Have always managed to sort mine out when I’ve had problems, and never been charged anything for the priveledge either.

maybe one of these would suit you more, and less to go wrong.

No Apple stores in this country 🙁

maybe one of these would suit you more, and less to go wrong.

Either you’re too young or have a very bad memory!

No Apple stores in this country

*struggles to believe there’s any country without an Apple store*

Really – there are no Apple stores here.

here is where?

Israel.

Nip over the border to The Lebanon or Syria?

It would seem they dropped the compatibility for that format, lots of annoyed people on Apple forum asking about it.

No Apple stores in Syria or Lebanon either. I’ll go and join the ranks of the annoyed on the apple forum 🙁

You could just convert the files into MP3

Old .m4a and all .m4b files have Digital Rights Management applied to them and will need the device to be authorised before they will play on it. If you have re-installed the device then maybe the authorisation key has been deleted from the device.

Try making sure that the files all play correctly on your computer via iTunes first, then sync the iPod again. That *should* re-install the correct keys.

If the files will not play through iTunes, then you will need to resolve that issue before they will work on iPod.

And next time – back it up.

hope that helps

Rachel

The files I converted to mp3 will not sync to the ipod!!!

Rachel – The m4a files were ripped by myself using he-aac codec in Winamp – no drm is involved. I can play back the files from the ipod in iTunes, but they don’t play on the device itself. The mp3 files I re-encoded from m4a (and only the files I re-encoded) will not sync to the device at all!!!

All my content is backed up, I should have backed up the OS, but assumed that a media player would continue to be able to play the same media that it was able to before.