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.

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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.

Related posts

• Replace iTunes with Floola (12)
• Configuring gtkpod for Music Playback (6)
• Winamp iPod Plugin (5)
• Sync iTunes with non iPod mp3 players (11)
• Sync any mp3 player with iTunes (2)