Quixperiment: Ubuntu and iPod

I have an old iPod that I occasionally use on car trips, but haven’t really modified in years (it mostly sits on a shelf). This morning I decided to play around a bit with hooking it up with my main Ubuntu desktop. I found a good list of options for managing an iPod in Linux on Wikipedia, and decided to try out both gtkpod and Rythymbox. Both seemed to work pretty well for interfacing to the iPod, no a super-shiny interface, but usable. A slight advantage to gtkpod, because it displayed my Smart Playlists, while Rhythmbox only displayed the static ones. Between the two, I can imagine using Rhythmbox as my primary music player, but would probably only use gtkpod for directly managing the iPod.

I copied my iPod music library over to Rhythmbox’s local library, just to try it out. It copied 3,249 tracks out of the 3,359 that were on my iPod. I got a few errors about duplicate files during the copy, all with generic file names like “01 - Track 01.mp3”. There were ~4-5 CDs like this, each with ~19-25 tracks, so that seems to account for the missing 110 tracks, though I didn’t keep exact notes, or do an exact comparison to see which files were missed. I’m guessing a handful of CDs I had loaded on the iPod were ripped with generic file names rather than specific titles, and that the iPod was separating them by directory structure, while Rhythmbox was loading them all in one directory so the file names conflicted. Just a guess, I’ll look into it more later if it ends up being useful.

Things I wish for in Rhythmbox:

• The ability to copy a playlist from the iPod to the local music library, instead of recreating it.
• The ability to synchronize my music and playlists between different computers/devices (will look into Ubuntu One for this later, it has some relevant features, though possibly not yet the full user journey I’m looking for).
• A way to split up my local library into Music, Audiobooks, and Language Learning. Shuffle mode is pretty useless when it brings up random chapters of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” or snippets of Afrikaans language drills. I found suggestions that it’s possible to configure multiple Libraries for Rhythmbox in gconf even though it’s not displayed in the GUI, but there was no ’library_locations’ key in /apps/rhythmbox, so I’ll have to poke around a bit more later to see if it’s still a valid key in current versions of Rhythmbox. (Separating libraries is a problem on the iPod itself, so this is just a same-old existing irritation repeated in a new piece of software.)
• A shinier user interface, that makes it easier to find artists, albums, or songs I want to listen to.
• More informative error messages when failing to copy files.
• I found one work-in-progress on integration between Rhythmbox and the Music Lens, I’d like to see that complete.