Rhythmbox Gets iPod Support

Bhondai writes "The latest release of the popular GNOME based iTunes clone, Rhythmbox has, amongst new features, initial support for the iPod. Things are still a little unpolished at this moment (requiring manual mounting of the iPod to /mnt/ipod), but this does look promising. A list of changes and new features in Rhythmbox 0.7.1 is available at Footnotes."

Comments

does it play ogg ?

[mirko]

Well I guess it does but despite the trollish title, I wonder if it on-the-fly convert OGG to MP3 when it transfer tunes to the ipod ?

Re:does it play ogg ?

[mirko]

Habeo Mac ergo I do, it's just the trick that would be technically interesting : if you can convert while syncing, then this might open some interesting opportunities ; a level/quality adjust for selections foirst comes to my mind.

Re:does it play ogg ?

[Moofie]

Uh huh. And re-ripping 40gb of music on the fly would take...how much processor?

Hell, if you want it to be that slow, why don't you just get one of the players that only supports the slow flavor of USB. (As opposed to the slightly-less-slow USB2)

Re:does it play ogg ?

[perly-king-69]

You really don't want to do that. Encoding from one lossy format to another will really degrade the quality.

Re:does it play ogg ?

[GauteL]

While this is certainly true, I can think of myself and lots of other people willing to take that loss in quality in order to not have to reencode their entire music collection.

Since Rhythmbox as an app don't really show the user the difference between an MP3 and an OGG you would assume that you could drag and drop ANY music file onto the iPod. While a small notice saying that this will lead to loss in quality might be reasonable, it certainly SHOULD do what the user asks it to do.

While I might want to reencode my entire music collection at some point, simple conversion from OGG->mp3 might be what I want if I just want to listen to a certain album on the road.

They changed their mind?

[OmniVector]

I remember speaking to one of the developers in the IRC channel specifically about this. Their response was "write a gnome-vfs module for it."

Granted they had a point, but that isn't as seamless as a solution if you ask me. It's about time gnome had a good ipod solution.

Re:They changed their mind?

[robbyjo]

I remember speaking to one of the developers in the IRC channel specifically about this. Their response was "write a gnome-vfs module for it."

Well, that's typical OSS developers... :) I'll bet that the iPod support is because someone actually came to the IRC channel and flame "Rhythmbox sux because it doesn't support iPod". ;)

Re:They changed their mind?

[adamwright]

Far more likely that one of the developers bought/was given an iPod. Nothing like experiencing the problem first hand to motive a programmer to provide a (decent) solution :)

May this project actually get finished...

[iamacat]

As in automatic mounting and unmounting, syncing with multiple devices and so on, rather than remain unpolished like so many Linux projects. I remember trying to sync a USB Clie with Linux and, although programs like kpilot were out for a while, they still required manual commands in a terminal window to work.

Re:May this project actually get finished...

[pldms]

Thankfully people are working on this, or at least part of the problem.

AIUI in response to this article by Havoc Pennington a project called HAL was started. This will hopefully form the userspace part of stack for convenient automounting behaviour. It's worth looking at the current (0.2) spec for the detail, but essentially you should be able to plug in an iPod and have RhythmBox detect that (via HAL, communicating using dbus).

I don't see...

[pdbaby]

what's so impressive about this? If you have to manually mount the ipod, then the only new feature is a front-end for "cp" and "ls". Anyone care to enlighten me?

Re:I don't see...

[ernstp]

No, that's not enough. For the songs to become visible on the iPod you have to edit the iPod's database, add ID3 tags etc.

Re:I don't see...

[sprouty76]

There's a lot more to syncing an iPod than just copying the mp3s onto it. There's a big database on there that needs to be modified every time you add a track, so that the iPod can find it while browsing by artist, genre etc.

iTunes XML

[Animaniac]

This was the one of two things holding me back from moving to Linux, as I use my iPod and iTunes a great deal on Windows. The second thing is the ability to import iTunes library data (which is conveniently stored in a nice XML file) into Rhythmbox. That way I can migrate from iTunes to Rythmbox with little trouble. That last feature would make the deal for me. I'd like to move my x86 machines to Linux and save up to get a nice Mac too. =)

What Rhythmbox still does not have

[Anonymous Coward]

VVC4 XML metadata support, common for years in WinAmp, Windows Media Player and other mainstream media software, still cannot be found in Rhythmbox. It is used by most or all DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies commonly used by internet content resellers. Without this users just cannot pay for content online and all Linux users will be classified as pirates.

Before we get this important feature Linux cannot make serious inroads in the corporate desktop market. It's not even a complex feature, just requires linking to libxml and some 500 lines of code. I made a patch for this myself but the RhythmBox developers rejected it claiming they don't want any more dependencies (libxml), but I believe the real reason is that they don't want to touch DRM. But the fact is musicians can't work for free and at some point we need to start paying or the whole industry will die.

Re:What Rhythmbox still does not have

[sn0wman3030]

There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO. Just buy the CD at the store, and rip it onto your hard drive. You get a disk with all the music, uncompressed. Plus, you get the case and all the artwork/essays that the artists include with each album. The artists still get paid, and everyone wins.

Rhythmbox integrates the wonderful Sound Juicer as a ripper. It is the most simple, straight-forward ripper available for the linux desktop. Rhythmbox may not be itunes yet, but it's making improvements constantly.

Syncing - Read only for now

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using this from CVS for about a month, and it only reads from the ipod. Write support is planned for the future.

In response to the comment about cp/ls - the iPod uses a proprietary database (iTunesDB) to store meta-information, so cp *mp3 /mnt/ipod/ will do nothing but store it on the iPod hd. You won't be able to play it

Meh. Innovation, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not innovation. Instead of looking at proprietary software and saying "let's do that!", developers with free time for GUI software should innovate. You heard me. Apple has developer mindshare not because of iTunes, but because it comes up with things like iTunes before anyone else does.

For all the talk of GPL != theft, there sure are a lot of clones of non-free software out there. Sometimes that's convenient for interoperability, but it's always a bad idea as a strategy -- it's just playing catchup. If Gnome, say, had said "let's make a really really good music player, with integration for everything useful and a nice interface" in 1999, it would be a lot more credible on the desktop. But no, the open-source world as a community waited and then imitated.

There are only a few GPL GUI apps that took a reasonably original idea (or reasonably original selection of ideas, to be fair, because most "original" software is made up of well-documented ideas) and did it well. In fact, I said "a few" to cover my ass -- I can't think of any at all.

Sigh. This is sounding more like a troll than I wanted. I guess it is one. I'm just disappointed. One reason I switched to Linux way back when is that it seemed fresh -- it might suck a bit, but it was justifiable and tolerable suck. It would get better fact, I assumed, and it would get better in strange, unheard-of ways. It sort of did. Mostly it didn't. Now it's just trying to look more like Microsoft and Apple's stuff.

How many Aqua GTK themes, now? And they *all* missed the point. It's not about pinstripes. Even Apple started backtracking on the pinstripes a bit. Pinstripes are the chrome, guys. Sticking them on GTK just gives you a ricecar*. What RealPlayer is to marketing, the Linux desktop today is to nerdery. In both cases, atypical users are making bizarre assumptions about what more ordinary users might like. RealPlayer had the advantage of early adoption. Linux has no advantage. It's judged on its merits, and its desktop merits for non-developers are slim to nil. Huge friendly transparent PNG icons don't matter. You gotta make it feel friendly yet solid. Solid yet friendly. Meditate on that for a while.

You don't get that pleasant-yet-stable feeling from clones. You just don't. It's like translated poetry, or the book of a movie. It misses the important parts and makes a big deal out of the boring stuff.

The GIMP is a clone (and if you don't believe it, compare things like the order of the layer transparency menu to Photoshop's). Sodipodi is suck. The only good video editing software isn't GPL. Blender couples the simplicity of emacs with the interface of vim. XMMS is a clone. OGG Vorbis is a conceptual clone -- it may not share any code with MP3, but you can't tell me it isn't essentially an "oh, yeah, we can do it too" situation, even if it's for all the best reasons. OpenOffice is complete garbage: it's ugly and unstable compared to the ten-year-old wopro my Mac Classic runs.

Okay, so there's Nautilus. That's the only thing that's really pushing any part of the envelope as a desktop app. And maybe Kudzu. Other than that, it's just a little chrome on Xerox PARC, Microsoft, and Apple.

This saddens me. I don't like it. Sometimes I try to do something about it, but ... meh. I run OS X on my desktop these days. I'd rather use the original iTunes. I can't recompile it, but I don't need to. I'm not saying OS X is the pinnacle of anything, just that in the end the GPL isn't as important to me as the feeling of a coherent, not-totally-derivative interface. (And yes, I know Apple's interface is derivative. It just isn't *as* derivative.)

Come on, guys. Let's see some GUI innovation already. Or is it already there and I'm just not noticing? Name some software that's:

0. GPL.
1. Useful.
2. Pleasant to use.
3. Not an instantly recognizable clone of something non-GPL.
4. Stable.

* Spelling intentional. Google it. In short, a lousy car decked out to look fast. Equivalent to "polished turd".

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[ickoonite]

I have had a similar experience, I suppose, starting out on DOS/Win 3.11, moving through Windows 9x and then finding Linux as a hope-inspiring alternative back in, oooh, about 1998. And hell, it did suck then - when I first started using it, KDE1 was in alpha/beta, but hey, it was different, so that was enough.

But like you say, there is always the lingering hope that it will get better. One is content with what one has when one is running Linux because, well, it's not Microsoft and some stuff (e.g. GNOME 2.6) is really rather beautiful. But, as I have pointed out before and as you rightly say here, there's very little innovation - GNOME 2.6's much-needed replacement for the file dialogue boxes are straight from Apple and the spatial file browser is another old Apple trick. And of course the Start button (you can write whatever you like on it; it's always gonna be a Start button) is hardly an open source original.

I suppose the root of the problem is that most open source development is done by nerds, whose C or asm prowess is indubitable but whose understanding of the average user is minimal to non-existent. I am not wishing to berate these types, because the work they do is often superb, but I think we can easily conclude that:

• Nerds cannot think like users and expect that every user should either work hard to understand the system or quite simply fuck off and not use their software;
• Users' expectations are far too high from a bunch of tech-types who have no understanding of users' needs.

We keep talking about Linux on the desktop. GNOME is now ready for the desktop, but what does that actually mean? OK, so now Linux is as usable as Windows, but somebody whit here the other day, Windows is not exactly good enough for most users. Why else would it need such a big tech support team in every organisation?

Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects (I cite xMule vs. aMule and mplayer as current or past examples), there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?

iqu :?

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[kfg]

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

--George Santayana

Sophmoric: The itch to be original

--Pete Seeger

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 1:9

I shall, I suppose, counter the orginal posters "troll" with one of my own. I too like software that just works. There are really only so many good ways to go about implementing most software tasks, and once those ways are discovered one is most apt to apply one's energies into refinement, not innovation.

While there is some real, solid work going on in software these days, most of it is fashion and barbarous. Most of the solid work really is going on in OSS, but a bit under the radar of the fashion concious, but OSS is not exempt from fashion.

Indeed, I'd say, contrary to the opinion of most involved in it, OSS is currently the bastion of fashion driven software, because it is written by "the people" who have little really deep understanding of what they are doing. They learned Java from the web. They never bothered to learn mathmatics or theory, indeed tend to deride mathmatics and theory.

While they may expend a good deal of mental energy on their code, they do not expend much mental energy at all on what they are doing.

Like, why they are even doing it in the first place, other than their itch. . .to be original.

Which they accomplish by following the trends. Go figure.

Like the Bible, Knuth is revered in passing, but largely unread. Codd is nearly vilified in some corners, or simply dismissed with a wave of the hand as "just theory". . .unread and un-understood, and unimplemented so that no one can even claim they have made a valid comparison with a working product. There's a good OSS project for someone. A project that can go where no man has gone before. A deeply useful project.

Who, in the internet "trained" generation, is even capable of it?

For that matter, who, in the modern trade school that even the universities have become, is capable of it?

The majority of coders are so busy "innovating" that they haven't even bothered to finish building the foundations. Software that just works. On known best principles. Even though it's just an evolutionary extension of someone else's work and not something that will get you a Slashdot headline.

That's what OSS is really all about. Otherwise we really are just better off spending our time making money to buy commercial "products."

KFG

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[slux]

Apple has developer mindshare not because of iTunes, but because it comes up with things like iTunes before anyone else does.

Apple didn't come up with the idea behind iTunes any more than the Rhythmbox developers, this Wikipedia article explains how it is based on SoundJam MP from another company and Apple just hired the people and bought the app. I would not be terribly surprised if there was something comparable even before that.

For all the talk of GPL != theft, there sure are a lot of clones of non-free software out there.

The "GPL != theft" part makes you sound a lot like a troll. Where did you get the idea that writing a similar app to an existing one is anything even remotely comparable to theft? It happens all the time even in the non-free software industry. More on that a little later.

How many Aqua GTK themes, now? And they *all* missed the point. It's not about pinstripes. Even Apple started backtracking on the pinstripes a bit. Pinstripes are the chrome, guys

People made Aqua GTK themes because they wanted them. It hasn't much to do with what direction GNOME, KDE or the free software desktop is taking. Why not rant about Windows XP which also has this Aqua theming craze and how Microsoft just doesn't get it?

The GIMP is a clone (and if you don't believe it, compare things like the order of the layer transparency menu to Photoshop's).

Again, even Adobe didn't originally come up with Photoshop. Just like Apple, they bought it after they saw what it was. (Wikipedia link. Drawing/image editing programs certainly have a long history before it as well. GIMP isn't the only clone either, there's other proprietary software such as Paint Shop Pro that is even closer to Photoshop as far as the look and feel go.

Blender couples the simplicity of emacs with the interface of vim.

Well, that's something original, isn't it? Some people think Blender's UI's just great.

XMMS is a clone. OGG Vorbis is a conceptual clone -- it may not share any code with MP3, but you can't tell me it isn't essentially an "oh, yeah, we can do it too" situation, even if it's for all the best reasons. OpenOffice is complete garbage: it's ugly and unstable compared to the ten-year-old wopro my Mac Classic runs.

And for every app you've mentioned there's also a lot of non-free clones and in many cases the dominant ones aren't the original appearances of the application type. Ogg Vorbis? It actually tries to improve (succesfully?) on the idea, providing better audio quality and/or smaller file size. There's AAC, mp3pro, WMA and a bunch of others too, you know. Why not whine about them too? What you said about Ooo.org pretty much applies to any modern Office suite.

Okay, so there's Nautilus. That's the only thing that's really pushing any part of the envelope as a desktop app. And maybe Kudzu. Other than that, it's just a little chrome on Xerox PARC, Microsoft, and Apple.

The desktop metaphor is still going strong after around 30 years (so's UNIX, by the way). The problem with lack of innovation in UI design is not just a GNOME or a KDE problem if you want to view it as one. If you want to see UI innovation you really shouldn't bee looking at the desktop environments that as their very goal are trying to provide the dominant user experience based on the 30-year-old metaphor. How about checking out something like Ion, Fluxbox and others from the plethora of available window managers? You could still also look at some of the more original stuff brewing for the big traditional environments, such as the kicker replacement called Slicker. In my opinion, GNOME has managed to stand u

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[damian]

I agree with you too, I had to think a while until I came up with a program that fits your requirements.

- gaim (ok, it does what other IMs do, but its different enough)
- grip
- sane (instead of n*m TWAIN crap)
- gphoto (instead of n*m crap camera tools)
- spamassassin (maybe not quite as pleasent to use)

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[ickoonite]

Your first paragraph entirely misses the point of my post. And at no point did I suggest that Microsoft didn't copy their whole UI from, well, whoever (anyway, it is irrelevant). And in response to...

"As a competative company you should be looking at what your rivals are doing and then providing them for your customers."

...I would first offer...

"Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects ... there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?"

A truly competitive company innovates - the only reason Apple are still extant in these days of Microsoft hegemony is because they innovate like fuck. If OSS was similarly innovative, it would enjoy wider usage already. What is the point of moving to a lookalike that cannot run your applications? (Linux, of course, has other real, geniune strengths, but the UI side is not one of them).

And nor was I arguing with the actual content of the Slashdot story - more hardware support for Linux is great - but rather seconding the parent thread, which in my view correctly opines the frustrating state of current OSS software development - neatly summed up as copy rather than create.

iqu :s

Re:Meh. Innovation, please?

[am 2k]

I used to use SoundJam before iTunes was available, that app was just an mp3 engine with a playlist (and plugin support for visuals, etc). Comparable to mpg123, I'd say.
That's not really what iTunes is about, iTunes is a music management app, which happens to be able to play them, too.

Re:Nervousness about RythmBox

[colinleroy]

The difference is, would it have been the other way, people could wonder whether Apple has copied code from Rhythmbox. But Rhythmbox came after, and we're quite sure they didn't get some code from iTunes.
Also, clones are very common in the software world, not only from open-source developers. Every good idea has been copied over and over.

GNOME Logo

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, please, please can you change the slashdot GNOME logo? The one currently being used on Slashdot was phased out years ago.

Re:Ryhtembox

[thomasvs]

With your spelling capacity, it probably was because you typed "rm hte box *.mp3" Anyways, your statement is crap, RhythmBox doesn't write to mp3 files, so it can't hose them.

Re:Well supported?

[mydigitalself]

gtkpod does sync entire library and playlists.

Re:Nervousness about RythmBox

[pldms]

Hell the visualisation in iTunes isn't just a clone of G-Force, it practically is G-Force.

More accurately it was G-Force. iTunes was based on SoundJam and G-Force (was G-Force part of SoundJam?), so G-Force was essentially forked when iTunes was created. Or something along those lines, at least...

Re:Nervousness about RythmBox

[pldms]

Silly me - if you open 'About iTunes' you'll find that:

'G-Force visualisation engine licenced from WhiteCap Technologies, inc'

Re:Can you imagine...

[perly-king-69]

Yeah, yeah - and in Soviet Russia iPods mount you...

Stability

[trans_err]

What rhythmbox really needs is a standard set of features (ID3 editting comes to mind) and stability. Rhythmbox has always been plagued with lock ups, freezes, and every other horrid use of the word. Ryhthmbox simply can not handle a large library of MP3s (10,000+). Most often rhythmbox simply will not even load that large a number of songs and simply die before it finishes.

Rhythmbox has a lot of promise, but they need to slow down for a second and fix the bugs which are preventing people to use what could be a really killer app.

Re:Stability

[jimmy_dean]

Actually, most stability problem that you see in Rhythmbox are due to the GStreamer media backend. GStreamer is still very much a new technology that at times is a little rough around the edges. It's sorta how Mozilla was for so long - very experimental before 1.0 and very unpredictable. I would expect to see GStreamer and Rhythmbox both stabalize rapidly in the near future.

Re:Problems with RhythmBox -- Still using GTKPod

[pldms]

RhythmBox uses the GStreamer media framework, so I suspect your problems lie there. You can use OSS, ALSA, ESD and ArTs (IIRC) with GStreamer.

I wish this were clearer in RhythmBox - it isn't very obvious how to configure sound output in it (gstreamer-properties, btw). However once I realised what was going on I prefered the central configuration.

Ironic Homepage Banner

[cyranoVR]

It's kind of ironic that their homepage banner shows rhythmbox playing "Bring Me to Life" by Evanesence.

Seeing as their server is on its way to being Slashdotted, maybe a better choice of Evanesence song would have been "Going Under?"