My Linux iPod management options
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Technology
So, it turns out there aren’t many options for me under Linux. In total it came out to zero. This is really due to the fact that my iPod Class version was released oh.. 35 days ago and the software versions are too new for the open-source Linux support. Have a look here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1353#iPod_classic_120GB
If you mount your iPod under linux, you’ll notice straight away that they have some funny database system for storing the songs. This database version and format actually changes between revisions of the iPod software release. The open-source solutions are all capable of reading and writing the older versions because they’ve reverse engineered the format. But they need some more time to get the new ones working. Unlucky for me.
As a result, most of the open-source solutions would actually copy the songs to the iPod but failed to update the iPod database. Oddly enough they didn’t complain about this. So I would just assume that it worked but the music didn’t show up in the iPod menu.
In the end, I tried the following solutions:
- Amarok – failed to install ‘cos I don’t have KDE installed and it was looking for something called kbuildsycoca on startup. Apparently it will wipe out your cover art on some iPods if you’re not careful.
- Banshee – I tried the stable 0.12.1 release in the portage tree. It’s okay. It’s the only open-source solution which actually downloaded cover art for my library. The next unstable release is 1.2.1-rc2 which was brilliant compared to the previous release. Unfortunately it didn’t work with my iPod version.
- gtkpod – Nice, convenient and small. Not too feature-full at all. I would have preferred to install and use this one because everything else required hundreds of other dependencies. Pity it didn’t work.
- Rhythmbox – Similar to banshee, smaller. Would have been nice if it had worked. I think this is the default manager on Ubuntu so it’s probably well supported and has a future.
- Songbird – Now this is my ideal manager. It’s very similar to iTunes and it didn’t require hundreds of dependencies. You can just download the binaries from their site and run it. Fantastic. It’s a professional product as well. All shiny. When they support my iPod, I’m switching to this.
My conclusions and next steps:
- I’m going to use iTunes as a stop-gap until Songbird supports the new iPod Classic on Linux.
- I need to convert my entire FLAC library to ALAC so that I can import my songs losslessly into iTunes until I get a linux client. (They all support my FLAC ‘cos I compiled it in everywhere.)
- I polluted my nice clean gentoo install with hundreds of new dependencies and applications which didn’t work. I’m now spending the day cleaning up all orphaned files which don’t belong. It gives me something to do.
2 Comments to My Linux iPod management options
After this, are you happy about drinking the apple Kool-aid?
Yeah… it’s quite a nice little machine. My entire music collection is sitting in it and I just need to scroll to the CD I want to listen to. So it’s convenient. However, it’s not as life-changing as I thought it would be. I was kind of expecting to suddenly be cool and hip. It doesn’t work that way, it seems.
October 23, 2008