What makes iPods complicated to use on GNU/Linux desktops, is the iTunesDB file that has to be parsed and written for the iPod firmware to be happy. If it wasn't for that, you could just mount it as a regular USB drive, and copy the files over.
A friend of mine recently bought an iPod video, and had a few fights with his media player while trying to compile an iPod plugin for it, but with no luck. When he came over to my place, I suggested that he could switch firmware to Rockbox. The installation might not have been the easiest, using dd to extract the firmware from the iPod's HDD, compile a tool which was then used to patch the original firmware with a bootloader, and then copy onto it the Rockbox binaries afterwards.
However, it is now possible to just copy music into the mounted iPod using any file browser, and it'll show up in Rockbox immidiately. Rockbox also offers many new features to iPod owners. Does the Apple firmware play OGG Vorbis or FLAC files? WavPack? AC3, then? Rockbox still can't play video files, though, but the Rockbox bootloader actually sets up a dual boot environment, so that you're able to switch over for watching videos, or playback DRM'ed files, if you have to.
You can't possibly offend my G4, its slow PowerPC CPU renders it useless in any production environment. I only used it for web surfing and music listening, for which it was barely "okay".
However, I had no such performance problems with Quod Libet, which can do mostly everything iTunes does, and if not built in, then through plugins. Except for the DRM infested music store, that is, but the up-and-coming new music player Songbird has focus on web content, and thus also alternative online stores.
If I was paying money for digital files, I'd never buy some lossy file which I couldn't use freely, thanks to DRM. FLAC audio, on the other hand...
Hey, iTunes is a bloated piece of shit! Just having the application playing in the background playing uses lots of resources on my Power Mac G4, not to mention tagging files or searching through the library (I had to give up on searching and browse instead, because the iTunes was almost like freezing after every character I typed in). I quite recently bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, and now I refuse to use anything but Quod Libet for listening to music! It is the ultimate music application!
That's exactly the same thing as I was thinking. When I saw the topic in the RSS feed, I was thinking that a new Free Software visual novel engine had been released, but this Blade Engine thing is closed source (and even comes with a pretty scary EULA). I can't even use it, as it's for Windows only! It's free of charge, sure, but why couldn't they at least make a link to the Ren'py project in the article?
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What makes iPods complicated to use on GNU/Linux desktops, is the iTunesDB file that has to be parsed and written for the iPod firmware to be happy. If it wasn't for that, you could just mount it as a regular USB drive, and copy the files over.
A friend of mine recently bought an iPod video, and had a few fights with his media player while trying to compile an iPod plugin for it, but with no luck. When he came over to my place, I suggested that he could switch firmware to Rockbox. The installation might not have been the easiest, using dd to extract the firmware from the iPod's HDD, compile a tool which was then used to patch the original firmware with a bootloader, and then copy onto it the Rockbox binaries afterwards.
However, it is now possible to just copy music into the mounted iPod using any file browser, and it'll show up in Rockbox immidiately. Rockbox also offers many new features to iPod owners. Does the Apple firmware play OGG Vorbis or FLAC files? WavPack? AC3, then? Rockbox still can't play video files, though, but the Rockbox bootloader actually sets up a dual boot environment, so that you're able to switch over for watching videos, or playback DRM'ed files, if you have to.
You can't possibly offend my G4, its slow PowerPC CPU renders it useless in any production environment. I only used it for web surfing and music listening, for which it was barely "okay". However, I had no such performance problems with Quod Libet, which can do mostly everything iTunes does, and if not built in, then through plugins. Except for the DRM infested music store, that is, but the up-and-coming new music player Songbird has focus on web content, and thus also alternative online stores. If I was paying money for digital files, I'd never buy some lossy file which I couldn't use freely, thanks to DRM. FLAC audio, on the other hand...
Hey, iTunes is a bloated piece of shit! Just having the application playing in the background playing uses lots of resources on my Power Mac G4, not to mention tagging files or searching through the library (I had to give up on searching and browse instead, because the iTunes was almost like freezing after every character I typed in). I quite recently bought a laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, and now I refuse to use anything but Quod Libet for listening to music! It is the ultimate music application!
Quite right, but there's also X-Moto!
That's exactly the same thing as I was thinking. When I saw the topic in the RSS feed, I was thinking that a new Free Software visual novel engine had been released, but this Blade Engine thing is closed source (and even comes with a pretty scary EULA). I can't even use it, as it's for Windows only! It's free of charge, sure, but why couldn't they at least make a link to the Ren'py project in the article?