Ubuntu One Music Store Now Available For All

My first thought was that Ubuntu competing with iTunes and the like was kind of silly but perhaps a decent revenue stream.

Then I remembered some of the netbook reviews I've read where a clueless person bought an Ubuntu box and found it just too difficult to get it to work with their mp3 player or complained that iTunes doesn't support Linux and therefore Linux is useless. This might help that sort of user stay with Ubuntu.

Not that iTunes isn't one of the worst Windows apps available (almost as bad as Quicktime ...), but can it run in Wine?

I tried it just to find out, "playonlinux" is supposed to help installing it smoother to wine. I simply install it directly and yes it work, but from my understanding it can play music and do online stuff, but not actually sync the ipod (unless running through Virtualbox).

For me personally it wouldn't be a problem because I would only buy mp3 player that is supported by Rockbox firmwares. Even without Rockbox, there are better choices of devices out there that isn't locked down iPod because they support more formats. I really can not let my media entertainments limited and subjected to h.264 and AAC.

I've tried playonlinux. I installed several programs (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, probably some others too) just to see how well it worked. Nothing worked.

> Not that iTunes isn't one of the worst Windows apps available (almost as bad as Quicktime ...), but can it run in Wine?

Per WineHQ, yes. though the iTunes store doesn't work and it may or may not sync with an iPod. See http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application...

You may also find the following writeup for iTunes 7.3 helpful: http://www.wine-reviews.net/applications/itunes-73-on-linux-...

My first thought was, great now I have an easy to access music store that doesn't depend on Apple, iPods or ITunes stores.

Since my earlier post, I've thought that even if iTunes ran, there might be trouble with the USB access via Wine.

Like many of you, I also have an iPod, but I've since bought a $20 player - a Centon Craze with 4 GB of space. In any computer, it's just a USB drive, and I can use Rhythmbox and gPodder to manage the music and podcasts on it - I could do the whole thing in Rhythmbox, but I really like gPodder for podcast management, so I split between the two.

Since I got this $20 player, I haven't picked up the iPod at all. iTunes is a huge hassle, and since my iPod was initialized in a Mac environment, it uses HFS+, which I can read fine in Linux but can't write to ...

And although it isn't billed as such, the Centon Craze plays oggs. It won't play FLACs, and for that reason I'd like to get a Sansa Clip+.

That and the interface for the Centon is terrible. That's one area where the iPod is doing a lot better. But I like the freedom of being able to do what I want with the player and not be tied to iTunes. I guess I could try Rockbox, but the $20 solution is working very well for me.

hehe. I just avoided the whole silly iPod thing and got myself a Cowon iAudio X5. :) Course, I don't use it much these days...but when I do I love it. It's dual booting the original OS and Rockbox.

I have my ipod, happily I was smart about it. It works flawlessly with linux via gtkpod, that and I researched ahead of time and made sure I got a fifth gen.

Coby MP300 Works beautifully on everything.

My brother bought a Clip, I only get to play with it a bit, I'm not much of a fan and he returned it. I have the Sansa which run on Rockbox. Of course, you can get these used on eBay for cheap and Rockbox allow it to support microSDHC. It's a really good because of the iPod-like control and very long battery life. Rockbox give life to these cheap players, you're miss out if not using it, though I feel it's more specifically for audio enthusiastic type.

Quoting: I just avoided the whole silly iPod thing and got myself a Cowon iAudio X5. :)

This is what I did too (well, I got the 7) . Nice little devices. Just comes up as an external drive and you can drag files on to it, great battery life, really small and loads of storage space.

Most of the stuff on it is Ogg, taken straight from CDs. I was at a friend's last year and wanted to pull the Ogg files off a couple of CDs he said I should try. I was surprised to find that you can't see the files in Windows. Fortunately he had an old laptop he'd tried Mandriva on, so we could pull them off with konqueror. These days, CDs usually have MP3 files on them as well - always wondered why they'd do that.

Uh...CDs generally don't have any audio files on them...they are made of audio tracks that have to be ripped and converted to an audio file format...generally you'll see .cda listings in a file browser, if anything, in Windows. Konqueror must show as audio files for automatic rip/convert (I use grip myself for all my ripping needs).

Ah, that would explain why it takes so long just to copy tracks! I had assumed Windows hid that from you on purpose. I used to use grip as well, until konqueror started showing the tracks in a listing. I wonder why sometimes they show up as Ogg only and sometimes as MP3 as well.

yup. The general process is that it rips the cd audio track to wav, then converts the wav to ogg/mp3/whatever.

I got Weird Al's last CD, Linkin Park, and it has mp3s and oggs on it. I thought that was pretty neat.