Downloading old iPod and wiping old Zune

I have an iPod Nano 6th gen, a Zune 4G, and an iPhone 6 I've been hanging on to. Or rather they've been hanging on to my electric service, just sitting there charging, unused for years, going on decades.

I've been in a clean-out phase for awhile, and a ton of old electronics are gone. These had hung around because the iPod had some music I had made on it, the Zune had possibly better bitrate cd rips than my pc archives, and I used the iPhone 6 as a home monitor occasionally (to watch the dog when we were on vacation). But the day had come to get rid of them. The question was could they be downloaded and wiped first.

First the iPod. I googled for awhile.  I ended up finding what I needed to get the music off from these links: 

• https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-found-my-old-ipod.2377868/ 
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/sgki45/how_do_i_pull_music_from_my_ipod_to_macbook_pro/

I hooked the iPod up to my M1 mac, found the folder in Finder, and pressed command+shift+period. Then I copied the files to my mac, mostly the music folder. The mp3s had strange short names. I then copied them to a Windows 10 desktop. I installed iTunes from the Microsoft Store.  I imported the songs and set the organize in Music folder option in Preferences (so that they would be put in Artist and Album folders and get the filenames converted to song names. I then grabbed the nicely-organized files from the Music/iTunes/Music folder in Explorer, and moved them where the rest of my music was.

Next I unchecked the device autosync option in iTunes and connected the device. There's a little box that appears in the top left (ish) of the iTunes window. I wish I had grabbed a screenshot. Choosing that box put iTunes into some device mgt mode, and I was able to restore the iPod to factory settings, basically reloading the version of the OS that was on it.

One down! Next I tackled the Zune. I decided I didn't want to bother trying to save the music. So I just wanted to restore it to factory. Googling led to this link:

• https://tipok.org.ua/node/30#:~:text=Format%20Device%20from%20the%20Zune,%22erase%20all%20content%22%20button.

So I "unlocked" the device, and held down the "back" and "up" keys. The next part is tricky. You then hold down "back"  and "play/pause", but you have to do it when the screen turns black from the last step, not when the device finishes rebooting. If you do it right, it tells you it's going to wipe your content, and then goes ahead.

Two devices down! The iPhone, being half the age of the others and more sophisticated, was much easier. But the iPhone battery had swollen, bulging the actual iPhone case right apart at the seams, even though it was half the age of the others. Nonetheless, I was able to remove my Apple ID/account, and reset the device, and then turn it off.

It would be nice to get the iPod and Zune into the hands of enthusiasts or collectors, but in my experience it's practically impossible, so all three are headed to Staples to get recycled today.