Update: The info on SoundJuicer’s gstreamer settings is incomplete and will result in low kb/s rates and bad tags. Please see the next post for better information.

Wow.

Just…wow. I got an iPod recently and today I set out to start populating it with music using Linux. Not Mac, not Windows, but Linux.

To look at the copy, it’s pretty straight forward. For example, see here and here, which all cheerily say that, with a little bit of fiddling, it’s a breeze to set up one’s iPod with Linux.

The devil is, as they say, in the details. And in getting this to work, I touched on each of the three other articles I’ve started but not yet posted to this blog I thought I’d set down all of the issues I went through to get the iPod up because this stuff needs to be documented, and linux developers really should sit down and think about how to streamline aspects of this. It most certainly did not help that my boyfriend — with his iTunes and Windows — gloated at every step of the way while I struggled, screamed, and finally ranted at my computer.¹

First, a small bit of background. In the last two weeks or so, I’ve been ripping CD’s to my computer using Sound Juicer. For assorted reasons that were perhaps not well thought out, or well informed enough, I chose to rip them in FLAC (free lossless audio codec) format, on the theory that I could then preserve all the needed information and so on. (Never mind that the increased size meant that I filled up my hdd in short order, decided to put all my music on an external hdd, and subsequently discovered that particular hdd (or its cable) is bad — that’s an irrelevant detour, although I’ll post later about that, doubtless.) In any case, I now have a music directory full of my favorite albums in FLAC format.

In the first order of business, Ubuntu 6.06 recognizes the iPod just fine. I plugged it in, and an iPod-specific icon comes up, it’s mounted under /media/ipod, and everything looks fine. Despite what this author states about initializing the ipod with Windows/iTunes before getting started on Linux, I had no problems with this; Ubuntu evidently sets everything up just fine: FAT32 (which is readable by Linux, Windows, and Mac) and all the requisite folders. However there are a few weird things that could make someone nervous. First of all, when the iPod is connected to the computer, it instantly goes into DO NOT DISCONNECT mode. This does look alarming, but after some playing around I have to conclude that merely being mounted as /media/ipod (or your flavour, if not running Ubuntu; there are plenty of excellent instructions out there if you need to manually mount your iPod) triggers this message on iPod’s side.

Interestingly, “ejecting” the iPod icon on the Ubuntu desktop doesn’t work, if I am still running Rhythmbox or Amarok. I have to close these applications down before an eject works, and then the iPod will go to its main menu, and I can pull out the usb cable. Psst, folks! THAT SUCKS. Get it fixed at some point, ‘k? I should be able to configure a Linux music player to grab (or leave alone) an iPod and not have to figure out why it is staying in DO NOT DISCONNECT mode even when I try to umount the damn thing. Anyway. Oh by the way, on Ubuntu 6.06, Rhythmbox by default pops up when the iPod is connected. To stop that annoyance, go to Systems->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media Preferences. Click on the Multimedia tag and either uncheck the Portable Music Players section or put something else in place of Rhythmbox.

I then set out to figure out which of the various music players understand the iPod. Rhythmbox can read the iPod, but it cannot write to it, so that’s out. It’s not clear to me what Amarok can do with the iPod, but I got nowhere with it (this relates back to lack of useful documentation). In searching through google, I found that gtkpod is designed to work with the iPod and so I went about installing that. I tried playing around with it and got nowhere, but then I wondered about file formats…

Googling some more, I found that iPods do not recognize FLAC format. Aha! So I set about looking into how to convert into something else. Mp3, because of its ubiquity, seems the best bet, even though it is a lossy format. Technically, since I have the CD’s I already have the high quality backup on them in a sense . Now this got interesting. First I checked Sound Juicer to see if I could just rip the CD’s as mp3 (not that I planned to re-rip some 150 CD’s, but for future ripping). This involved setting up a new profile per the directions given here. After a false alarm which I realised involved misspelling “channels” (note to self: copy and paste exists for a reason), I got Sound Juicer to rip a CD into mp3 format. Hurrah! BTW, even though I have already run the Easy Ubuntu app for al the proprietary codecs, I still wound up setting up a few more things as per the documentation here and here, I installed a few more goodies like gxine and so forth, but I did already have the gstreamer stuff that SJ needed, in the end.

So at this point, I wanted to put the single directory I ripped into the iPod to be sure the whole mp3 enchilada was kosher with this puppy before going any further with conversion. So back to gtkpod. The documentation on this consists just of screenshots saying “Oh this is the Edit menu…” YES I CAN SEE THAT!! NOW HOW ABOUT ADDING “HOW TO ACTUALLY EXPORT TO THE IPOD” IN YOUR DOCUMENTATION. But no matter how many times I clicked on the “sync” list after “adding” mp3 files, it did bupkus. Somewhere along the line, in a personal blog discussing gtkpod (forgive me, I misplaced the link), someone happened to mention the lefthanded panel needing to have the “ipod” name and I thought, whoa. Does it need to be clicked onto IPOD (as opposed to Local or Podcast, the default on my system being for some mysterious reason, Podcast)? AHA. Yes. Select the “Ipod” on the left panel, and THEN “add” the directory or the files. How hard is this to document? Not very. How hard is this to intuit? Well it took me an hour or so of fiddling and frustration. I was thinking in terms of pulling up the files I wanted from Local and then putting them “into” iPod, but that’s not how gtkpod works…

And so once I “put” the files into the “ipod” section, and clicked on the sync, it worked! And I detached the iPod and played the music. And it was good

But back to those FLAC files. I didn’t want to rip all the CDs with Sound Juicer again, obviously, so I hunted around for a converter. Surprisingly, it’s not straightforward to just convert FLAC to MP3. I finally found something called the “audio-converter” via this article. (Interestingly, there seems to be a number of Windows based $$ converters out there, I had to qualify my google search with “linux” as well.) I didn’t much feel like downloading a package or source, but when I checked the synaptic package manager, I found matches, and so I installed them. But…bupkus. ?? WTF? I have no idea what happened with that. So I went back to the tool’s homepage which was no small chore as it seemed to be having connectivity problems throughout the day. Still, once I poked around a while I realized that 1) this was a script 2) nautilus actually is extensible with scripts and 3) if the scripts are stuffed into ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts, they are instantly available via right clicking in a nautilus window. So I popped the script into the directory, made it executable and sure enough, now the right click had a Scripts option (no such option will appear at all if the above directory is empty) under which I could pick audio-convert! But it doesn’t work! It tells me that I don’t have the flac codec.

Erm. I only have 35G of perfectly working FLAC encoded music files! Well upon inspecting the script, I saw that it just assumes /usr/bin/flac must be present. So, I found this in the synaptic package manager as well, installed THAT, and tried the audio-convert again.

Did I mention that I was sucking down my patented mojitos during all this to dull the pain? No? Never mind, then.

So now with the particular flac it wanted installed, it ran just peachy. Although the dammed thing keeps yanking focus back to its little dialog boxes (does it have a SHUT UP AND RUN mode?), which makes it difficult to do something else while it’s busy converting files (like write this up). That aside, I don’t think it’s really doing a proper job with the tagging. So enter…

EasyTAG!. Also installable from Ubuntu’s synaptic package manager. But first, to convert all those FLAC files…

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¹Well no, the fella didn’t gloat. But he utterly does not understand why I went to all this trouble, and honestly since he’s not a linux head case, I can’t blame him at all for not understanding…