The iPod server was a powerful first iteration music sharing device. While not designed for convenience, its internal RAID can still be expanded with modern compact flash cards for 1.25TB of on-the-go storage.
how the iPod needed to use its database to present real names to the user
I mean in Apple’s defense you wouldn’t want a media player to show filenames to the user anyways, you would want to display the artist/track name from the mp3 tags. The 4 letter filenames are a hash table presumably due to length restrictions in the firmware and/or performance reasons
Iirc thats what OP is referring to, they would strew the files stripped of meta data across the partition in various folders with little discernible structure, track data was written to the database and would be queried on song plays. I believe the advantages were faster bootup (Scan db instead of thousands of files) and the random file names were to ensure unique keys in db and help the “random” algorithm.
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