Archive for June, 2006

A lot of media players on GNU/Linux support the iPod MP3 players these days(for eg: amaroK, Banshee, Rhythmbox etc). I personally use Gtkpod to transfer the music from my Gentoo machine to the iPod player. Once configured, its really easy to use the Gtkpod application to do the music transfers. First install it using the package manager available on your operating system:
On Gentoo:

(I have added ‘aac’ support to Gtkpod by adding a line ‘app-pda/gtkpod aac’ to /etc/portage/package.use file before doing the emerge)

On Debian/Ubuntu/Kubuntu:

On Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva:
Use RPM files or Yum/Yast/urpmi/etc package managers to install Gtkpod.

Its a GTK application, so if GNOME is installed, Gtkpod should be very easy to install on any GNU/Linux distribution, even if it means compiling it from the sources.

Now connect iPod to the USB port of the computer using its data cable and use ‘dmesg’ command to find its device name:

Don’t panic; just try to find the names that look like sdaX, sdbX, sdcX etc from the output. You can see sdb1 and sdb2 in the above output, so these are the two devices that represent iPod on my machine. The music files are stored in the second partition of the iPod, so I need to mount sdb2 in my filesystem before I run Gtkpod so that it can see the iPod music folders. Mount the device and run Gtkpod:

The name of the iPod device should be visible in the left pane of the Gtkpod application(along with the label ‘local’ which is used to store local playlists). Select the name that represents your iPod device and select File->Read iTunesDB (or “Read” button from the toolbar). All the tracks and playlists from iPod should now be imported into Gtkpod. You can click the visible tracks to play them on the computer.

To transfer music to iPod from the computer, either create a new playlist or select an existing playlist in the iPod. To create a new playlist, highlight the name of the iPod device as visible in the left pane of Gtkpod and click “New PL” from the toolbar. Enter a name for the playlist when prompted. Now highlight the playlist into which you want to add the new music files and then select File->Add Files or File->Add Dir. Select the music files and press “Open” or the “OK” button. To finally write the added files/directories to iPod, click the “Sync” button from the Gtkpod toolbar. Wait for the files to be transferred to the device and then quit the application. Before you disconnect iPod from the comupter, don’t forget to first unmount the device:

Now you can safely unplug iPod from the computer. Browse through the playlists in iPod to check if the files have been properly added to the device or not. Once you are satisfied, you can make the above process simpler by automating some of the steps that we have performed. As a first step, add the following line to the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sdb2 /mnt/ipod noauto,users 0 0

Replace sdb2 and the mount directory as appropriate for your case. Now a simple command will mount the iPod player:

Gtkpod can be configured to automatically do this step for us at its startup time(and unmount the device when it exits). Go to Edit->Edit Preferences (or press Ctrl-P) and enter the mount directory(/mnt/ipod) in the first text field. Then check the field“Handle mounting/unmounting of ipod drive” visible just below the text box. Click the OK button. Now you can just plug the device to the USB port and start the gtkpod application; it will automatically handle mounting and unmounting of the device. However, if ever you get an error message while quitting the application that it was not able to unmount the device properly, make sure that you manually unmount the device before unplugging it.

You can do a lot more with your iPod from GNU/Linux using the Gtkpod application; more details are available in its ReadMe file.

Libraries like libnjb make it possible to connect a lot of other popular MP3 players(many of the Creative MP3 Players) to the GNU/Linux machines. The latest MTP devices released by Creative are a tough nut to crack though, but the cousin project of libnjb, called libmtp, might just make it possible within a short period of time. One of the several frontends available for the Creative MP3 Players that are supported by libnjb library is Gnomad2.