- (is it possible that a fully drained battery prevents the iPod from working even when connected to a pc? ) - Yes. Models may differ, but in my experience when the battery is fully drained, the iPod is unable to do anything until the battery receives some charge. If the battery has reached the end of its life, that means that the iPod will not work
- (is it possible to revive just the logic circuitry to move the contents elsewhere? ) - I doubt it, unless you have another battery installed. However, the songs should all be in your iTunes Library. Are the missing ones also iTunes Store purchases or are they from somewhere else (such as ripped from CD or purchased from another online store)? If you're missing purchases from the iTunes Store, you should be able to download them again from your account page in the store
- (what can I use instead of that iPod given that the songs I bought via iTunes are in the Apple encrypted format that will not be read by other devices?) - First of all, how long ago did you buy these songs because iTunes no longer sells songs with DRM (Digital Rights Management)? That is, in a protected format
I think iTunes stopped using DRM in music files by May 2009, so any purchases since DRM was dropped are not protected and will play on most modern MP3 players (including Android phones). If you did buy music with DRM, there was an opportunity to replace the protected versions with non-protected copies, although I think that window has closed. But first of all, you need to find out whether any of the music you've purchased from the iTunes Store is subject to DRM.
An easy way to do that is to use the Songs view in your iTunes Library:
- Switch to the Songs view
- right-click the header bar and select kind from the context menu:
- study the kind column and look for any song that has Protected AAC audio file. These are the ones that will cause you issues. Look carefully because the non-protected ones have Purchased AAC audio file in that column - very easy to miss-read the text. See the following screenshots:
- Tip - if you click on the header bar title kind, the column will be sorted in alphabetical order and if you have a mix of protected and non-protected, they will be sorted into two groups (purchased and protected). That way, all protected songs will be grouped together and easier to spot (I have only one DRM song)
- if you look at an individual song, by right-clicking the song and looking on the File tab, for the kind field, you will see that same text:
So that's the first thing to find out - do you actually have any protected songs?
- if not, then all of your music can be copied to - and played on, a non-Apple device
- if you do have any protected songs, how many?
Instead of an iPod, you can use iTunes itself, an iPhone, iPad, or iPad mini. (Or an Android device.) Oh - and (I assume) the Music app on a new model of Mac.
