Overview

With Ubuntu 6.06, the Gnome desktop, a video iPod plus a few programs, it’s pretty easy to install music on the iPod. The main things to keep in mind are these:

1. Most free linux distros do not contain support for MP3 since it is a proprietary format. As a result, much of this will need to be installed first. Ubuntu users can use the tools EasyUbuntu, or Automatix (Mepis users too). For other distros, googling up instructions for installing various codecs, gstreamer libraries and such should provide the necessary instructions. More commercial installations probably already have the necessary items installed. There’s extensive documentation about this here. which is Ubuntu specific and very detailed.
2. iPods can have two different filesystems: HFS+ is the Mac version, FAT32 the Window version. Generally, if an iPod is initialized with one operating system, the corresponding filesystem has already been set. My iPod has only ever connected with my Ubuntu setup, and that chose the FAT32 system. While Linux can handle either, generally it takes more tweaking, even kernel recompiles, to handle the Mac version; it seems easier overall to go with FAT32 (and all three O/S understand it, which is a potential bonus for some folk). There’s a tutorial here that discusses conversion of the file system if this is necessary.
3. The music files must be in a format the iPod can play. The iPod supports
   AAC, MP3, and WAV. (This unfortunately leaves out several excellent open source formats such as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.) This means that when songs are downloaded or ripped they must be in one of these formats. I chose MP3.

4. The linux system must be able to recognize and mount the iPod. Dapper had no trouble at all with this. In fact it has the cutest little iPod icon for the mounted device. Generally speaking, the newer models with USB ports should not be problematic; if the iPod is first or second generation with firewire, there’s plenty of information via google search to deal with that.
5. All told, two programs are necessary: one is to rip the music from the CDs in the correct format for the iPod, and the other is to sync the music over to the iPod. I used Sound Juicer to rip and gtkpod to sync
6. MP3 files are tagged via ID3 so that the album, artist, and track information can be retrieved from the files. In most cases, the software that rips the music handles the basic tag info, but there are also other programs that will add additional tag information. There are different ID3 versions, and care must be taken that versions are not accidentally switched along the way (eg the ripper expects one, and the syncer the other). Sound Juicer, with the correct settings, will properly set up the basic tag info as it extracts the music.
7. On Ubuntu, to eject the iPod (and stop the “do not disconnect” message, which will show as long as the iPod is mounted), make sure all programs such as gtkpod, Amarok, any filemanager displaying directories in the iPod, etc, are stopped, and then right click on the iPod icon and eject it or umount from command line. Otherwise the eject will fail with the message that other applications are using the iPod.

I found that the key to success lay in all the prep work on the music files I did before attempting to set them up on the iPod.

The basic sequence I am using now is:
Sound Juicer to rip the CD and then gtkpod to transfer them over. This is extremely basic! There’s no album cover art, no lyrics. Just album, artist, song names, track numbers, and playlists. I’m still working out the details of lyrics, album artwork, photos, and videoclips and will cover that in following articles.

Sound Juicer

Sound Juicer is the default CD ripper in Gnome. In Dapper, it pops up when an audio CD is inserted. The original configuration for Sound Juicer does not contain a profile for MP3, so the first step is to add such a profile.

This requires gstreamer-lame, id3v2mux. EasyUbuntu and Automatix should have installed these, but if not, searching through the Synaptic Package Manager should locate them. There’s extensive documentation about this here.

Start up SoundJuicer, and click on Edit->Preferences from the menu. In the dialog box near the bottom is a selection for different profiles, with an “Edit Profiles…” button to the right of this. A new dialog box will show; click on the New button along the top. For the Profile Name, I entered “CD Quality, MPG. The new profile is now listed in the list of profiles, so I could now select it and edit it. In this box, I put in CD Quality, Lossy for the profile name and MP3 for the description (to match the format of the predefined entries; there will now be two CD Quality, Lossy entries, but the type of file extension will distinguish between the two). The all important part is adding

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1001 ! id3v2mux

in the GStreamer Pipeline definition. For the file extension, I used mp3, and then I checked the Active? checkbox and saved it. Now back in the Preference dialog, I chose the new profile as the Output Format and closed the box.

At this point, SoundJuicer should rip MP3 format files without any trouble.

Some notes: I found SoundJuicer pretty straightforward to use. On the Dapper distro, it is the default application to pop up when an audio cd is inserted. It’s also available in the Applications->Sound & Media menu & installable from Synaptic Package Manager. It’s gnome based.

gtkpod

gtkpod is a small application that will build up a list of music files to be transferred over to the iPod and then sync it (actually transfer the chosen files) on demand. It can also copy files from the iPod back to the computer, and can do other management, such as delete files, etc. I got my copy through the Synaptic Package Manager, and other download versions are readily available.

The first thing to establish is the iTunesDB. This was completely non-obvious to me, but from the menu, Files->Read iTunesDB does the trick. I kept trying iTunesDB Sync and other approaches because the error message indicates that no syncing has happened, therefore, etc. and so on. Once I got that, then I was confused with how to set up a list of files to go to the iPod. I found it was necessary to click on the “iPod” part on the left first. I had been building lists on the “Local” section (which is still sitting there) and could not for the life of me figure out how to get it on the iPod. There’s two ways to add songs to the list on the right panel; files can be read in and listed individually, or all files recursively under a starting directory can be pulled in at once. Now clicking on the Sync button will transfer all the chosen files over to the iPod. Then exit the gtkpod application, make sure nothing else is peeking at the iPod, and eject it, to see the songs.

Some thoughts and cautions

Some things to keep in mind. Updates and upgrades in this area have been quite rapid. This means it’s very easy to google up outdated information. Always check the date of the article, and establish which Linux and iPod versions are under discussion (that’s why I listed mine above).

The biggest stumbling block by far will be the lack of documentation. What I describe above (SoundJuicer+gtkpod) sounds simple, and it is, but I spent no few hours trying to make sense of these programs and searching online for tips and information. If I want to check out other programs, say GNUpod, I expect it to take a few days just to figure out how to use it and what its shortcomings are. I will likely not find extensive documentation and precious little for the questions and concerns I have. So that needs to be kept in mind.

If there’s a forum or mailing list for something, check it out! In gtkpod’s case, the documentation sucks, but the gtk-questions mailing list is fabulous: lots of responsive and helpful people there. And hopefully some efforts are underway to document gtkpod, because I think it’s a very nice little program.

For KDE users/purists, I believe that Amarok can handle all of these aspects, which I will also investigate and post about.

I haven’t even gotten to photos and movies yet! *Wipes brow*