Well, that’s fighting talk where I come from, and if Apple said not to do it, I’m doing it!

Here we have the freshly plucked (well, torn) battery:

The pristine, non-violated, battery.

First I peeled off the yellow tape stuff, this revealed a rather funky little circuit board!

Funky little circuit board thingy

Next, I peeled back it’s silver foil:

Cover your eyes, it's a naked battery!

It’s at this point there was a funny smell, some sort of chemical thing. Meh, doesn’t scare me. You’ll notice some dark marks on the white paper in the photo above. This is some sort of liquid that’s leaking from the injured battery. That does scare me, but luckily I’m too daft to care.

The body of the battery is several layers of ’stuff’ (stop me if I’m getting to technical) which I began to unroll…

Ooh, that's all this then...

Unrolling it was proving to be tricky since it kept wanting to spring back to it’s rolled shape, but also due to the fact that I didn’t want to touch the damn thing as more liquid was leaking from it, the smell was getting worse and now small fragments of black stuff were falling out of it.

BANG! *poof*

It all came to an end when I unrolled it to about half way, it sprang back, crackled, sparked and smoke came out of it. What made me stop was after doing it three times it wouldn’t spark and smoke any more, so I got bored of it.

Several times I’ve looked over my shoulder to see if my bin is in flames, thus far it is not.

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Well, that’s when you need a playlist. Amarok does it’s own playlists, but that’s to create a playlist of songs that are on your hard drive. This tutorial is on how to create a playlist for your iPod using the songs that are on your iPod.

First things first (I’m assuming you already have songs on your iPod and you’ve used Amarok to do this) connect your iPod to the PC (it should auto-mount, most new distros recognise iPods) and load up Amarok. Click the DEVICES tab (down the left side of the screen) then click the CONNECT button at the top left of the window:

You should now see a list of all the songs, and albums, that are on your iPod. At the top of that list are two red folders, Podcasts and Playlists.

I’ve read tutorials that say you should right click on songs/albums and add them to a playlist, while the options are there to do that, it showed nothing on my iPod. After much searching, and trial and error, I found that dragging and dropping is what worked for me. So, first of all, lets create a new playlist.

Right clck on Playlists and choose ‘Create Playlist’:

And give your playlist a name, I’ll make one for AC/DC.

There it is, but it’s empty. If the playlist had songs in it, it would have that little + symbol beside it, like my Metallica playlist has. Let’s put some songs in there.

To add songs, simply open out your artists and albums (by clicking the + symbols beside them) and drag the song titles up to the playlist.

All I did was drag ‘Rock N’ Roll Train’ up, on to ACDC, and let go. Keep doing that to add songs. If I click the + symbol beside ACDC, I can see what’s in that playlist so far.

TIP: Holding down the Ctrl key lets you pick several songs to drag up in one go.

But what if I want them to play in a different order? Simply drag them arounf within the ACDC playlist.

To keep your playlist on your iPod, click the DISCONNECT button (top left)

And to be extra safe, right click on the iPod (on your desktop, I’m using Ubuntu 9.04) and EJECT it.

Done!

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Initially I tried Rhythmbox, since that’s what came with Ubuntu. While initially it did seem to be a great tool for the job I just couldn’t get it to detect my iPod. Which is, to put it lightly, useless.

Next, I tried Exaile. No, not Exhale, Exaile! It looked almost identical to Amarok! I had high hopes for Exaile. It found my iPod, so far so good. But would it send anything to my iPod? Nope.

Back to the drawing board…

Having hunted around various places for a solution to my Exaile problem, I read about Banshee.

Banshee - King of media players, says me.

So it looks nothing like Amarok, but it most certainly does the job. Well, minus one thing: it has a bug in its podcast facilities. It will check podcasts, tell you when new ones are available, but it won’t download them. It starts the download, reaches about 20% (at most) then stops downloading the podcast. Various people have launched bug reports on this, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. Banshee detects my iPod instantly, and automatically mounts it – something that even Amarok didn’t do! You can even have it, like iTunes, automatically sync your iPod with your collection. Banshee uses several sources for finding covers for your music. It does seem a bit odd that I can’t give it some basic info and send it searching again, as it seems to be: ‘here’s my best guess, take it or leave it’. I put a cover image in the albums directory and call it cover.jpg – that seems to work.

My iPod is screaming like a Banshee, as is my Ubuntu install, so I’m happy!Similar Posts:

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I bought an iPod *sob*

Forgive me! I was tempted by value for money! No seriously it was! 80Gb Black iPod Classic for £160 from OverclockersUK.

The only snag is that it’s 6th Generation and 6G is where Apple altered the iPod’s to only work with iTunes. But fear not! The latest update to libgpod (0.6.0) allows the iPod and Amarok to share some mp3 looooove.

Only problem is: you have to *gulp* compile libgpod!

And with the release of Hardy, there’s no need to compile libgpod! Yaaayyy!

Using a few threads from Ubuntu Forums I was able to get my iPod working fantastic with Amarok. Here’s how I did it:

Previously, you had to download, compile and install libgpod. Not now. The Hardy repositories now have the latest libgpod ready to install.

Just one small snag: the version installed with Hardy does not support album covers, so make sure you install the other version of libgpod from the repo’s. See my post about it here:

http://ronnietucker.co.uk/blog/2008/05/05/when-ipod-art-goes-awry/

That’s basically it!

When you first plug the iPod in, you’ll get no response from Amarok, you need to mount your iPod, this is easily done by opening a window to view the contents of the iPod, don’t alter anything!. Amarok should now recognise it and automatically connect to the iPod, if not, check the Devices tab there’s an iPod button, click that and from the menu I’d choose my Black 80Gb iPod Classic. From my Collection tab (in Amarok) I select a few albums to transfer. Click back to devices and transfer them to the iPod.

Still in the Devices tab I select to disconnect the iPod and I get an error message which says it’s not disconnected but it’s ok, it has been safely ejected. Now unplug the iPod.

*drumroll*

YESSSsss!!!

All good! Got my songs playing, flipping through my album artwork all good.

Still don’t like Apple though… giving me all that hard work to do, hmf!

Enjoy!

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