Spin Ink

Are you using Linux, but still going back to windows to put songs on your iPod? Well, you don’t have to use that infernal iTunes anymore! Amarok 1.4(currently in beta) now uses a new library, libgpod, for interfacing with iPods. This new library was originally baked into gtkpod, but was recently made self-contained and released as a separate project by the good folks from the gtkpod project.

While I greatly appreciate the work the gtkpod project has done to bring iPod support to Linux, I find gtkpod itself abhorrent. I apologize if I am stepping on anyones toes here, but I detest the way gtk applications look and I find gtkpod extremely clunky and unfriendly to use. That said, thanks for liberating this awesome library, libgpod, from your project. So, if you have been using gtkpod because it is the lesser of two evils, then you should certainly check out Amarok 1.4, even if it is still in beta.

Issues

Once I got Amarok 1.4 beta 1 built on my 64bit SuSE 10 box, I did encounter a minor issue where Amarok crashed at startup. But, this was easy to fix, mv ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok ~/.kde/share/apps/amarokOLD. Once this is done, you should have no trouble starting Amarok. You will need to refetch your cover art, and if you had podcast feeds in Amarok, you will need to: Close Amarok, and cp ~/.kde/share/apps/amarokOLD/podcastbrowser_save.xml ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/podcastbrowser_save.xml to get them loaded into Amarok 1.4.

After resolving these minor issues, I connected my iPod and Amarok detected that I plugged in a media player. Then on the Media Device tab of Amarok, I clicked on the configure button in its upper right corner, and set it to Apple iPod. If you only see vFat device, then your amarok 1.4 was built with out the libgpod libraries installed. Now, I was ready to load up my iPod Nano with tunes.

Adding Songs to Your iPod

To load your iPod, all you have to do is click on the media device tab on the left side of your Amarok window(see the screenshot) and drag-drop your songs from the playlist to the media device tab to queue them. Once you have added some songs to the media device queue, you can click transfer to begin copying them to the iPod. You can also add tracks to the queue while it is actively transfering songs.

Thanks to the gtkpod project for their work on libgpod and even more thanks to the Amarok crew for making the best audio player ever! It is now a pleasure to add songs to my iPod Nano and I look forward to the new features you guys are working on. Most of all, I want to say good riddance iTunes, you sorry, poorly designed excuse for a media player!