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Apple Cuts Off Linux iPod Users
Will Fisher writes "New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing out their own databases. We haven't found out how to generate our own valid hashes (but we do know the hash includes the database itself, and possibly the iPod serial number), and are looking for help."
They should talk to the GAIM^WPidgin developers. I've heard that they have a wee bit of experience in reverse-engineering hashes transmitted over a network.
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Just use Rockbox then. It's an open-source firmware replacement. Though it may not run on the newest generation of iPods yet... http://rockbox.org/
iTunes sucks. I have an iPod 160 and my library has 11,000 songs (and there are folks out there with 50,000+). I'm on Windows XP SP2 on a fast box with 2GB memory and USB 2.0. iTunes is entirely unscalable. It is very slow to do anything with my library, even with manual sync. Adding one song to the iPod is a 5-minute process. File transfer speed is not the problem. For sure iTunes wastes time doing unnecessary work. Ejecting the iPod alone takes over a minute. Also, the iTunes MP3 player is buggy. It has trouble with MP3/VBR and generates clicking in the audio output. MediaMonkey is a much better content organizer. It is very fast. But the Apple's file format change on the iPod Classic means the current version of MM can't handle the iPod filesystem. I hope the MM developers will have the problem solved soon.
Birth is the leading cause of death.
Usability and simplicity. I've had three other music players, some of them having received very good reviews (cowon products). But I used my wife's iPod, and it is simply a better, more user-friendly experience. I was disappointed to go back to my old player; and will very likely be replacing it with an ipod when it dies.
Itunes is another reason for the casual user. They don't care about formats. Most of them can't tell the difference in quality. They don't need to transfer it to a million different locations. They know they can hear a song they like, and own it, and enjoy it -- relatively cheaply, and without any headache or hassle. I'm not a fan of it for the reasons you mentioned, but the vast majority of the paying public doesn't really care about those issues. Most aren't even aware of them.
Encrypting of the database shouldn't directly affect rockbox, but they've been encrypting the firmware too, and the hardware will not run unencrypted firmware. It's not only the extremely new iPods that rockbox won't run on. I got a 2nd gen nano for free that I would love to install rockbox on, but the encryption thing appears to be one of the reasons they don't have a version for it yet.
So it's not that the encryption of the database directly prevents rockbox. The encryption of the database prevents users from using Linux with the Apple firmware, and since they've been encrypting the firmware for a while, installing rockbox isn't likely to be an option anytime soon.
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I doubt that is the case. The file is not encrypted; it's just signed with a hash. You can still get the files off of the thing, and you can find out what they are from the database, which is still readable. It's just impossible to modify the iTunesDB with third-party software now (at least until this gets cracked, which shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks). I'm guessing the reason is either for database integrity, or as some part of FairPlay (maybe to keep people from copying DRMed content between iPods).
iPods are highly overrated, and irritatingly restrictive. I have a sandisk sansa express (3gb after adding in the microSD) and the wife has a creative zen stone 3gb. Both were cheap and show up as USB drives on our respective Debian Linux 2.6.x boxen.
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I call BS. I wrote a rb-appscript tool to sync a master iTunes library (mostly ALAC) to a transcoded (AAC + other) iTunes library, and every last bit of ID3-style metadata was preserved in the files for an entire ~600 album collection. A few dimensions are stored only in the iTunes DB, the user/library specific stuff such as play count, rating, etc.
Note that the aforementioned tool works only by using Applescript to make iTunes transcode files, then transfers those files to the secondary library's directories -- there's no attempt to transfer data directly between the iTunes Library database files. The secondary iTunes picks up everything just fine from only the file-stored metadata.
The possible exception to this may be album art downloaded from iTunes (as opposed to that originally embedded in tracks and/or manually acquired using something like the AmazonArt widget, web search, etc.). Haven't really experimented in this area much yet...
Install rockbox on an iPod, as that supports vorbis.
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