success!
For my birthday Mike got me a sexy 4th Generation iPod nano... in pink. I've never really been a huge iPod fan (or Apple fan, for that matter), but when I saw the promotions for the Chromatic series in New York awhile back I was tempted. And that temptation grew when Mike purchased a black one of his own a few weeks ago.
Up to this point I've been using a Sansa eSeries which has been solid; you can take it to the gym, run, go up flights of stairs and it doesn't skip, but even with a 2GB microSD expansion I was constantly left having to shuffle around which songs I wanted to keep and which songs I had to move off. Add to the fact that my Nano has video capabilities and I am thoroughly psyched about shelving the Sansa.
But as with most things in my life, out of the box there were some... difficulties. GTKPod has, historically, been the solution to iPod users on Linux, however with the newer series of iPods Apple has implemented some security measures which have rendered that avenue nigh useless. You would still be able to manage media files on the device, however newer generation models are unable to sync.
So I went down the line; I tried RhythmBox, Banshee, and Amarok all of which had their own host of issues. For a small point in time I thought I could try syncing with iTunes on my Windows XP VirtualBox, but have you tried getting USB devices working in VirtualBox on a Linux host? Even after adding a blank filter and a usbfs line to /etc/fstab I was still having issues. So I went back to the proverbial drawing board and I looked at which application was giving me the least amount of trouble, which was Amarok.
The initial problem was a permissions issue, which seems easy enough, but after every different way of chmodding, chowning, and mounting I was still running head first into a brick wall. Finally I found an obscure plugin setting (and pre-connect and post-connect options) Amarok finally initialized my iPod. I've now transferred my music collection over and am going through the arduous task of properly tagging everything.
So roughly 24 hours later I can finally use my sexy new birthday gift. My next challenge will be to convert some movie and video files on over, however that'll be sometime next month after I've re-tagged all of my music.
Up to this point I've been using a Sansa eSeries which has been solid; you can take it to the gym, run, go up flights of stairs and it doesn't skip, but even with a 2GB microSD expansion I was constantly left having to shuffle around which songs I wanted to keep and which songs I had to move off. Add to the fact that my Nano has video capabilities and I am thoroughly psyched about shelving the Sansa.
But as with most things in my life, out of the box there were some... difficulties. GTKPod has, historically, been the solution to iPod users on Linux, however with the newer series of iPods Apple has implemented some security measures which have rendered that avenue nigh useless. You would still be able to manage media files on the device, however newer generation models are unable to sync.
So I went down the line; I tried RhythmBox, Banshee, and Amarok all of which had their own host of issues. For a small point in time I thought I could try syncing with iTunes on my Windows XP VirtualBox, but have you tried getting USB devices working in VirtualBox on a Linux host? Even after adding a blank filter and a usbfs line to /etc/fstab I was still having issues. So I went back to the proverbial drawing board and I looked at which application was giving me the least amount of trouble, which was Amarok.
The initial problem was a permissions issue, which seems easy enough, but after every different way of chmodding, chowning, and mounting I was still running head first into a brick wall. Finally I found an obscure plugin setting (and pre-connect and post-connect options) Amarok finally initialized my iPod. I've now transferred my music collection over and am going through the arduous task of properly tagging everything.
So roughly 24 hours later I can finally use my sexy new birthday gift. My next challenge will be to convert some movie and video files on over, however that'll be sometime next month after I've re-tagged all of my music.