sync iPod with mac icloud contacts

That's because once you have Contacts turned on for iCloud, they aren't stored locally on your Mac anymore but instead or loaded from the cloud. So your iPod Classic and iTunes see an empty Address Book.

A work around is to export all of your contacts out of Address Book as vCards and them copy these vCards into your iPod's Contacts folder. You'll need to have the Enable Disk Use option ticked from under the iPod's Summary tab in order to browse out to the iPod's Contacts folder via the Finder.

Using your iPod as a storage drive

That's the only "solution" I have been able to use to get contacts to sync/appear on older iPod models.

B-rock

Actually, I had done the same thing a while back after running into the same problem. Sorry I that I didn't think of it sooner! 😝

Glad to hear you managed to figure it out though.

B-rock