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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."
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.
Help I'm a rock.
There's a great review of the iPod on Jesusgeeks.net from the founder (gregday). He uses the iPod under linux and has a list of the programs he used, how he used them, and how it all worked out. To see the iPod review/howto, go here.
Personally, I can't wait to get an iPod. For a while I've been dealing with a crappy mp3-cd player, but after reading so much about the iPod, I'm ready to make the switch as soon as I have the cash. 299 doesn't sound too bad for 5 gigs of mp3 storage. And it runs under linux! woohoo.
The anti-salmon
Considering that Apple, uh, "requested" that MediaFour rename the XPod software (now XPlay), and that the developers rename the xtunes jukebox (now "sumi")... I don't think "gnuPod" will be long for this world.
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I started a petition at Apple's Discussion board for people to "sign" (reply to) if you support Ogg Vorbis decoding on the iPod. The CPU the iPod uses is based on an ARM7 core, and will work nicely with Xiph's integer based decoder, Tremor. Anyone who supports it, especially those for whom Ogg support would be the deciding factor in an iPod purchase, are invited to add a comment here.
The only reason the iPod software revision 1.20 has Calendar, Contacts, EQ Presets, and track scrubbing is because users asked for it. So let's show Apple what it would take to convert all of us Freedom loving geeks! Support Ogg!
stores information in a XML file, so it's very easy to edit the data or write a frontend
Or so goes the conventional wisdom. As a Linux user, most of the software I run now uses XML for storing configuration and data. Of course, none of them can exchange data with any others, so it ends up just adding weight to everything. For example, why does the ogle DVD player require libxml2? Are DVDs in XML now? I must have missed the memo. In my experience, XML's supposed benefits are primarily vapor. At least binary formats save on storage space and network bandwidth.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
You need a FAT32 iPod, Linux, Firewire support and Perl5 to run the software. License: GPL V2.
Form the SyncPOD 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.
Features:
* Syncronisation with a local directory or a master playlist
* Optional playlists
* On the fly created playlists
* Mp3 info from mp3 tags or filenames
* Creation of iTunesDB file from all files on your iPod
The Archos Jukebox 6000 is a $199 6gig MP3 player and USB harddisk that has an open source linux driver and
open source firmware.
Perhaps you're not understanding that this isn't a "hardware mp3 decoder" chip - it's a general purpose CPU with approximately the processing power of an Intel 486 66-100MHz (depending on what you're doing). Provided the codec you want isn't too MIPS (or memory) hungry, you could software upgrade to support it.
Check out this HOWTO for using a Win-iPod under linux:
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~geha/ipod/
Executive summary:
1. Build a kernel to support IEEE1394
2. Mount the iPod as a vfat filesystem
3. Use Wine to run EphPod.
This is how I update my iPod, and it works, but it has some problems:
* The linux ieee1394 drives sometimes don't recognize the iPod, and sometimes generate kernel Oopsies.
* Some functions of EphPod don't work, must notably the "Add Directory" function. This is probably a Wine limitation, but it's still irritating. EphPod doesn't check the id3v2 Composer tags, so your iPod's Browse->Composer menu is empty. EphPod has the feel of an app with a lot of maturing left to do -- but it's better than nothing.
* In general, the process is pretty klunky and needs lots of by-hand coaxing and prodding. I expect this to improve as the ieee1394 drives and Wine both improve.
That said, it's really cool to see that someone's making native linux support for the iPod. If you check around, you can find that there are several efforts to do this underway, some more half-assed than others... a guy here who's written a perl script to dump the database, a guy there who's got a python script for the same. But it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of interest in seeing real linux support for the iPod, so I expect to see those disparate efforts coalesce pretty quickly. It'll be nice to have.
By the way, I just love my 20GB iPod. 150 albums downloaded so far, and still 8.5GB left. You've just gotta get one of these things!
--Jim
Just a year ago when the iPod was announced the slashdot post was full of comments about how it sucked, was too expensive, was inferior to what was already out there, how firewire was uneeded, how it was "Yet another overpriced toy with less features", and all kinds of other ranting and raving.
Now everyone seems to love it. Interesting.
This leads me to further conclusions: People hate/whine/complain about MAcs/OSX/Apple because they have not USED them. now that people have heard a friends iPod, they know the iPod rocks (and have gotten over the knee jerk reaction of a year ago).
So we see people adding support for it to Linux-- notice Apple didn't make it proprietary, they just made it convenient for *THEIR* software and others have been able to hack together software compatible with iTunes and not a peep from apple (Except when they name it xPod) No custom FireWire protocol (and trust me, they could have easily- there are dozens of proprietary random fireWire protocols that some hardware manufacturers use to lock you into their software. Fortunately that trend is on the wane.)
So, maybe Apple's strategy is working. Maybe some people have or will now experience the superior joy that comes with the iPod and realize that an iMac delivers the same quality differential... and stop looking at price and faked performance claims so much.
After all, inside of a year this crowd has gone from whining and complaining about the iPod to asking for Ogg support.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
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.)
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley