|
|
One of the common misconceptions is that your need Windows or Mac to be able to manage your iPod library. I tried this for the first time in 4 years and worked first time.
|
|
The Problem
iPod's are part of the Apple EcoSystem, and was once the main income before iPhones and iPads came into play. With iPods being an Apple product, and Apple loving to control every aspect of the user experience, it is notoriously a nightmare to manage an iPod without the propriety iTunes.
Now itunes at best is a very bad media player with built in library, designed in a way that it tries to take control of your computer, and it only written for OSX and Windows.
A linux way
There a probably a million different ways to manage your iPod's library under Linux, but I recently gave an old Generation 2 iPod Nano which had been collecting dust to my wife. Since I needed to quickly add some of her music to it, I had the following options
- Boot into windows and install itunes - which I avoid windows at all costs
- Do above in a virtual machine
- Install through wine
- Find a linux alternative.
Now, the notion of an iPod comes hand in hand with itunes. Apple has always made it harder to manage iPods in any other way than by apple's own means. But I made the mistake of trying to install iTunes in the past year, and found it was as helpless as sailing with no sails.
Possible Choices
Since I decided to go for a native way, i had to narrow down the choice of;
- Amarok - https://amarok.kde.org/
- Banshee - http://banshee.fm/
- Songbird / Nightingale - http://getnightingale.com/
Although each has its strength, i always preferred banshee as its never let me down.
Now, on this laptop I did not have it installed so I did the easy way and opened the terminal and used the following code;
sudo apt-get install banshee
This installed banshee with no issues. When I loaded up the program I found pleasure in importing music from cd's, they were a breeze. All I did was insert the CD's and I was given an import option.
Now for the iPod, I thought I would have to find an addon or plugin for this, as in the older days you did. This time round I plugged the ipod in and it just worked, synced fine and had now issues.
Now the overall experience was quite refreshing, much less work than 4 years ago. Linux has evolved well.
Full Story |
