In this tutorial I will be using Sound Juicer for ripping and Gtkpod for syncing.  I will assuming you have followed the original tutorial and are able to now sync your iPhone. There are, of course, a few tools to install – which I will cover now.

MP3 Support

Because Linux will default to Ogg Vorbis format, you need to add MP3 support for Sound Juicer. You will also, most likely, need to install Sound Juicer itself. For the longest time I used Grip for all of my ripping needs, but that tool has fallen behind and Sound Juicer is much better integrated with GNOME. So let’s install.

I will illustrate the installation using Synaptic. You can do this via command line if you want. If you do this via Synaptic you will not have to monkey with manually adding any repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. Fire up Synaptic and install the following:

• Sound Juicer
• lame
• ubuntu-restricted-extras
• gstreamer0.10-lame

You will have to search and select each of those one at a time. And you might find that adding ubuntu-restricted-extras will include the gstreamer application for you. Regardless, select the above and then click Apply to install them.

Once these are all installed you are ready to rock.

Sound Juicer

Figure 1

Now that you are ready, put in an audio CD into your CD device. When you do this a window will open asking you what application you would like to launch. From the drop down select “Open Audio CD Extractor” (see Figure 1). This is Sound Juicer.

You can configure this to be the default action if you like. This will, of course, depend upon what you typically want to happen when you insert an audio CD.

Figure 2

When Sound Juicer open (see Figure 2) you will first want to take care of one option – the output format. Because iPhones (and Apple in general) do not support the Ogg Vorbis format, you have to change the default output format for Sound Juicer. This is why you had to install gstreamer and lame.

Click on the Edit menu and select the Preferences entry. From the Preferences window change the Output Format to “CD Quality, MP3 (.mp3 type)” and then click Close.

You are now back to the main Sound Juicer window. Select the tracks you want to extract and then click the Extract button.  Of course, depending upon the CD, you might have to enter the CD information by hand.

Depending upon the speed of your machine, the speed of your CD drive, and the size of the data on the CD, this could take some time. To extract Rush Signals took 6 minutes 27 seconds. Once completed these files will be found in the ~/Music folder in a sub folder named by the extraction process (in the case of my example, ~/Music/Rush.

When that is finished you can close Sound Juicer, connect the iPhone, and sync with the help of Gtkpod.

Gtkpod

Figure 3

Once you have connected your device, and you see the phone icon on your desktop (see Figure 3), it is time to open up Gtkpod. I am going to assume you have already set up your iPhone repository in Gtkpod as outlined in the original article.

When Gtkpod is opened (and connected to your iPhone) you only have to click the Add Folder button fromt he main window, navigate to where the new directory holding your just-ripped music is located, select the folder containing your music (in this case /home/jlwallen/Music/Rush), and click Add. Depending upon the size of the directory, this can take some time.

Figure 4

When the files/folders are added you will see them listed in the main window (See Figure 4) and all you have to do is click the Save Changes button.

After the changes have completed (You will see the familiar Sync window on your iPhone), you can then exit out of Gtkpod, right click your iPhone desktop icon, and select Unmount from the menu. NOTE: You might also have to unmount the Camera portion of the iPhone before you remove your device.

Final thoughts

Is it as easy as iTunes? No. But it’s not iTunes and, in my opinion, that’s enough reason to be satisfied with the tools. And what is better – with this method you can sync as many iPhones as you like on this one computer. No more Apple 1:1 lock in. You want to put all of the songs on one iPhone onto other’s – go right ahead.

Hopefully soon this process will add to it syncing of the rest of the data to and from the iPhone.

The process is a bit involved, but not too difficult. I will walk you through the steps, some of which are command based, and some are not. And without further adieu, let’s get to the installation and configuration. NOTE: As with anything, use caution and ALWAYS back up your data. It is never guaranteed that you won’t lose data. You’ve been warned. ;-)

The installation

There are numerous tools to install. I will be doing this on a Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop box, so you will have to adjust your steps according to your distribution.

The first thing to do is add a repository to your apt sources. Do this with the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa

Now you need to update with the command:

sudo apt-get update

Once apt has completed the update issue the following to install the bulk of what is needed:

sudo apt-get install gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-bin gvfs-fuse libgvfscommon0 ifuse libgpod-dev libgpod-common libiphone-utils libiphone0 python-iphone libplist++1 libplist-utils python-plist libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev libusbmuxd1 usbmuxd

Quite a bit to install eh? And it’s all necessary. Let that process complete.

Edit fuse.conf

The next step is to edit the /etc/fuse.conf file so that your user will have access to the gvfs file system. Do this by opening the /etc/fuse.conf file in your favorite editor and changing this line:

#user_allow_other

to:

user_allow_other

Save that file and you are ready to move on.

Fuse group

Now you have to add your user to the fuse group. To do this go the User and Group entry in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu. When this tool opens click on the Key button to unlock the tool for administrative purposes. Now click the Manage Groups button and then scroll down until you find the fuse group. Double click the fuse group and then click the check box next to the user you want to have access to the fuse group. Click OK and then close out all of the User and Group windows.

Log out

The next step requires that you log out of your desktop and then log back in. This will ensure that all changes have taken place. Once this happens plug in your iPhone (or iTouch) and see if it automounts to your desktop. There will be two devices mount. The first device will show up as a camera, the second as a phone. Once you see both of these, you know you are nearly done.

Gtkpod

Unfortunately there are some bugs in Rhythmbox that prevent the user from writing to the iPhone/iTouch. That’s fine because there is always Gtkpod. You will need to install this with the command:

sudo apt-get install gtkpod

Once this is installed you will find the entry for it in the Sound &  Video sub-menu of the Applications menu. Fire that tool up and you are nearly complete.

Figure 1

The last thing you need to do is to configure Gtkpod to mount your device. In the Edit menu you will notice a Repository/iPod Options entry. You have to configure your device as a repository for Gtkpod.

As you can see (in Figure 1) you have to configure where the device will be mounted. This is where it might seem a bit more complicated than need be.

Because of having to use gvfs, the mount point will be in ~/.gvfs/ and will be listed as the name of your device. You will have to open up a terminal and change into that directory to find out what it is called. In my case it was ~/.gvfs/Jack Wallen. So I would enter that in iPod Mountpoint configuration section.

The next option to configure is the Model. Make sure you select the correct model. Do so by clicking the drop down and choosing your model from the list. Once you have done this, click the Add button to add your new device repository. You can then OK the Options window and you are ready to load your iPhone.

Back in the main Gtkpod window click the Load iPod(s) button and eventually your device will show up. You can now add music to your device! Make sure, when you are done adding music, to click the Save Changes button.

Final thoughts

It’s taken long enough, but the ability to add music to an iPhone has finally arrived. The next step, hopefully, will be the syncing of apps and contact/calendar data. I have a feeling that’s going to be another long wait.

The first thing you must do is make sure you have the applications installed on your machine. One reader pointed out that gtkpod had trouble with XMMS (which, I admit, is an old-school application). With modern distributions XMMS is not typically installed, yet gtkpod still defaults to XMMS being the default player on some distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva for example). We’ll fix that.

Let’s first show how to get gtkpod running with a command line player. We’ll use mpg123 because it’s one of the more universal players. You can install mpg123 either from command line or from the Add/Remove Software utility. From the command line the installation would be something like:

apt-get install mpg123

or

yum install mpg123

One mpg123 is installed you can then fire up gtkpod for configuration.

From the Edit menu select Preferences to open up the configuration window.

Gtkpod Preferences Window

There are two lines to configure:

Command for ‘Play now’

Command for ‘Enqueue’

Both of these can be configured with the command. As you can see, in the figure above, my Fedora 10 default installation of gtkpod defaults to using XDG. This is an outstanding GUI application for use with gtkpod. But let’s make a simple change. Edit that line to read:

mpg123 %s

and click OK. Now go back to gtkpod, right click on a song and select “Play Now”. The selected song should start playing. Now here’s one issue with using a command line tool for playback: In order to stop playback you have to open a terminal window and issue the killall command. In our example you would issue the command killall -9 mpg123. Or you could wait for the song to complete. If you queue a number of songs for playback then you will definitetly have to issue the killall command to stop playback.

The same configuration holds true for an external GUI application. The good news about using a GUI application is that you can control the playback of the file much better.

Should you want to use XMMS for the playback of files you will most likely either have to delete the current XMMS (if you do not have mp3 support rolled into your current XMMS installation.) Say you are using Fedora. To change XMMS for mp3 support issue the following commands (as root):

rpm -e xmms (Only if XMMS is already installed)

yum install xmms-mp3

Now if you use XMMS as your playback application you would have xmms %s for your playback configuration.

Final Thoughts

Yes it’s true, it would be nice if gtkpod had a built in player. However, having a reliable application for syncing an overly-flaky, yet overwhelmingly popular music device far outweighs having to configure the application to use a working playback system.

First Steps

The first thing you need to do is to plug in your iPod and mount the device. Before you actually plug in the device there are a few tasks to take care of. The first of these tasks is to create a directory where the iPod will be mounted. As the root user issue the command mkdir /media/mp3. You can name this directory whatever you want. Once you have the directory created you can plug in your iPod. Now issue the command dmesg so we can find out where your iPod was detected. When dmesg has completed you will see output like:

sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 58605120 512-byte hardware sectors (30006 MB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 68 00 00 08
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] 58605120 512-byte hardware sectors (30006 MB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 68 00 00 08
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1 sdb2

As you can see my iPod was listed at /dev/sdb. So now we know what entry to add to /etc/fstab. As the root user again open up /etc/fstab and append the following line:

/dev/sdb2 /media/mp3 auto ro,noauto,user 0 0

NOTE: The above line will vary depending upon where your iPod was detected and what directory you created for mounting purposes.

With your fstab entry in place exit out of the root user and issue the command mount /media/mp3 (Where mp3 is the directory you created for mounting purposes).

If you issue the command ls /media/mp3 you should now see the contents of your iPod. And with the iPod mounted gtkpod should automatically detecte the iPod.

Fire it up!

Now it’s time to open up gtkpod. This will most likely be in your Audio/Video or Multimedia menu subdirectory of the Main Menu. If you do not find it you will have to install it. Most distributions do not include gtkpod by default. If yo open up the Add/Remove Applications utility you can find it doing a search for “gtkpod”.

Once gtkpod is open, so long as your iPod is mounted, it should detect the device and load it.

gtkpod main window

As you can see gtkpod is pretty much a no-frills means to sync your iPod in Linux. Using gtkpod is pretty straightforward: Click to add files or directories, click Save Changes (sync), click to Load your iPod. There is only one issue that you must know about. When you are done with your iPod you need to close gtkpod and then UNMOUNT your iPod! To unmount your iPod go back to the command line and issue the command umount /media/mp3 Where mp3 is the actual directory where you have mounted your device. If you do not unmount your device you risk losing your data.

Final Thoughts

Gtkpod is one of the most reliable iPod managing tools in Linux. Sure there are far better multi-media players (such as Banshee or Amarok), but their iPod support can be flakey at best. Give gtkpod a try. If you’re looking for a reliable way to sync your iPod in Linux, this might be it.