Posts Tagged ipod
Todays Science Experiment: Disassembling an iPod battery (or: How To Burn Your House Down)
Having finally managed to get my iPod Classic open, I replaced its aging battery for a spiffy new one. Upon reading the label on the old battery, it said: Do NOT disassemble.
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.
Creating an iPod playlist in Amarok
The one thing I love about mp3 players is that you can just stick it on random and it’s like having your own jukebox. But what about when you want to play only certain songs? Or play only those certain songs on random?
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.
Banshee – King of all things iPod
Since converting to Ubuntu, and Gnome, it’s been fun trying out new apps to replace the trusty old KDE ones I used to use. The one thing I had been dreading, was trying to find a replacement for good ol’ Amarok. Well, the day finally came where I had to download my weekly podcasts and update my iPod Classic 80gb.
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!
When iPod Art Goes Awry
Having installed Kubuntu Hardy I dreaded the thought of having to recompile the libgpod library to get my iPod Classic (Black) working again. After installing Amarok I thought I’d try my iPod anyway.
Lo and behold, it worked!
Hoorah!
Well, it did. Until I actually flipped through the cover art and played some tracks did I notice that my cover art had gone awry. Drat!
After some tinkering I noticed in my Adept (package manager) that installed was libgpod3-nogtk, when I looked at the description for the library I noticed:
This version does not include artwork support
So I uninstalled it and installed the libgpod3 library.
All good!
Cover art is back (be sure to click the ipod icon at the top of Amarok, and choose Update Artwork). All is good between Amarok and iPods.
Above: the two libraries (and descriptions) in Adept
Black 80GB iPod Classic
I’m not proud of what I’ve done. Not proud at all…
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:
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I use:
