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

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*

Well, I played around with EasyTags for a while, but two things came up that caused me to set it aside (and I may or may not return to using it). First, I realized that SoundJuicer (and for that matter audio-convert) still needed tweaking to properly handle the ID3 tags; I was still back at the general issue of — even though I converted the FLAC files to MP3– having to hand edit all of the tags. Erk.

At this point I played around with Konqueror, which makes a decent CD ripper in its own right, actually. I started it up, typed audiocd:/ in its location bar, and I saw the songs (.wav) on the CD, along with a folder for each of the formats it knows about. I dragged the format I wanted to the directory I wanted on my hdd (using another instance of Konqueror, of course) and it converted them as it copied them over from the CD. Everything wound up with lovely tags. The only drawback is that it seemed a little slow. Default bitrate is 128, but that can be changed in the Kontrol panel (since I run gnome, I used kcontrol from the command line; I’ve installed the complete kde libraries). On the menu, choose the Sound & Media -> Audio CD to find the MP3 Encoder tab which has options to change the bitrate as desired.

At this point, I tested the iPod by loading up (via gtkpod) the newly refurbished MP3 files and all looks well at this point. So now that I know this is the direction to go, I need to get all my music files properly prepped. I have more to say about gtkpod — quite a lot more — but I want to keep this relatively coherent.

But back to SoundJuicer. According to the documentation here, and here (which I noted in the last post, but did not read thoroughly ), Sound Juicer needs a slightly different gstreamer setting to handle MP3 properly. In the process, I also used the modification that creates a better bitrate. This seems to be working well, so I am in the tedious process of properly re-ripping the CDs. I am using audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1001 ! id3v2mux and it’s working nicely.

The question now is that of tagging. I need the files to be properly tagged via ID3. This is what iPod uses to categorize everything, plus the cover art, lyrics etc. I already tried EasyTag, but I’ve put that aside for now, because it also has a distressing tendency to save things left and right even on files I have not worked on, and I don’t know what is going on with that. (”Don’t make me nervous…you wouldn’t like me when I’m nervous…”)

I poked around on musicbrainz and found PicardTagger which actually is overall one of the better tagging programs I found. The documentation is decent and I was able to noodle around and fix tags pretty easily. The biggest shortfall I see here is an inability to somehow add lyrics.

According to the ID3 documentation, lyrics may be added under the USLT field which is then stored as part of the overall tag with the file. This is what iPod uses in order to show lyrics (keep clicking center when playing a song, and the lyrics will show up, if they have been synchronized over with the music). However, understandably so, there are massive copyright issues with lyrics and so most tagging programs I checked out do not supply lyrics. However, it should be okay for me as an individual to copy texts onto my iPod for personal use, which is all I want. But it’s hard to find stuff for that.

This actually led me back to Amarok. There are several add-on scripts such as Lyric Manager which are designed to do what I’d like. (Yes, that’s me in the recent comments; check the older ones and there’s one cryptic comment about saving to the notes directory on an iPod, so I am pursuing this avenue at the moment.) I will report on this after I have wrestled with it for a while.

Back to the gtkpod. Overall, this utility seems to work well with the iPod. Its main shortcoming is an utter lack of documentation. And unfortunately the interface is not intuitive. I’m trying to talk with some of the folks over there about improving the documentation. Their mailing list is very responsive, so this may be improved in the future. But as an example of one issue: it took me some time and fiddling to understand that the way to get a copy of the iTunesDB onto my computer so that adding new songs did not obliterate the ones already there, I had to click on File->Read iTunesDB. The “Synchronize iTunesDB” was not the corrrect choice, nor were any other “synchronize” choices and it’s crucial to understand that within gtkpod, “export” is TO THE COMPUTER, “import” is TO THE IPOD, which is exactly reversed from how I would think of it. There isn’t anything helpful in the documentation, at most it cautions the reader to be sure that the iTunesDB is in sync with the local one or songs may be lost. (More ranting and yelling at the computer at this point.)

In any case, stay tuned for the next post. At the end of all this, I want to post a single nuts and bolts How To for Linux and the iPod. It has to be easier than this, folks!!

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…