iPod on Linux... with GPLed software

Anonymous Coward writes "gnuPod 0.2 has just been released. It's the first GPLed program that allows you to use your iPod under Linux. It has support for playlists and stores information in a XML file, so it's very easy to edit the data or write a frontend. Still a bit 'beta' but its ready for every-day-use and it works well together with iTunes. A mac-ipod2win-ipod howto is also included."

Comments

How does apple feel about this?

[prichardson]

They didn't seem to make too much of a fuss when people successfully plugged them into their Windoze boxes, but will Apple get angry at this?

Probably not, Apple seems to be pretty nice about people messing with their stuff.

Re:How does apple feel about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in my experience. In my experience, Apple doesn't care what you do with their hardware.

Of course, if you want to copy their software, they get a little pissed. And if you want to resell their ROM code for profit, they get even MORE pissed.

And if you want to copy their custom designs, they get pissed too.

But I never heard them complain about installing alternate software on their hardware, or modifying their hardware, or otherwise having a good time with their products.

Re:How does apple feel about this?

[timeOday]

Apple seems to be pretty nice about people messing with their stuff.

I don't think I care how Apple feels about me messing with my stuff.

(And by "their" I hope you didn't mean Apple, because they're selling these things, not lending them out).

There is always more than one tool ... ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using 'SyncPOD'. Form the homepage:

This script syncs a local directory with your iPod. If the directory is larger than the space on your iPod you can sync this larger directory with a master playlist: SyncPOD - Syncs a local folder with your iPod

Features:

* Syncronisation with
a) a local directory
b) a master playlist

* Optional playlists

* On the fly created playlists

* Mp3 info from
a) mp3 tags
b) filenames

* Creation of iTunesDB file from all files on you iPod

Been playing with it this week

[plastik55]

I stopped using gnuPod since it didn't support ordering (i.e., if I added all the songs in an album, they'd show up on the iPod in alphabetical order, rather than the proper order determined by the track numers in the id3 tag. gnuPOD also doesn't do synchronization, and the hoops you have to go through to remove files from the iPod are rather cumbersome.

SyncPOD seems to work better for me. It has its own limitations and bugaboos, but it knows how to do correct ordering. I threw together a script which select albums from my collection at random to fill 5GB of space and makes symlinks to the selected mp3 files inside SyncPOD's synchronization directory. It works, after a little debugging (be warned that SyncPOD in its present release doesn't escape spaces or any other characters in filenames which might be interpreted by the shell.)

What I asked for - bitrate reduction and iTunes!!!

[SuperKendall]

In addition to asking for iPod Vorbis support, I also asked that they supported Vorbis in iTunes and bitrate reduction.

Now that iTunes has music rating, imagine a feature where you could say "Take all of the music I've selected to sync to this small device, and compress all music (starting with the lowest rated songs) until it all fits.

Since Vorbis has great bitrate reduction features I think this would be pretty easy to support and would really increase usability of small devices, in that you wouldn't have to think so hard about how to choose what would fit - just what you want.

Interesting. Another iPod story...

[daves]

... from the man who pronounced it lame.