Managing an iPod
 

Hi,

I do not own an iPod, but I just installed my custom flavour of Slackware64 (Xfce + bells + whistles) to a friend here in my village.

For handling audio I have Audacious, but this application doesn't handle iPods. So I'm considering two solutions.

1. Eventually look for a GTK audio player that does manage iPods (which one?)
2. Install Gtkpod

If you have an iPod, what are your experiences? Do you have any suggestions?

Cheers,

Niki

I have 1st gen of ipod and it's working fine with gtkpod and i'm the maintainer of gtkpod in SBo

I'm currently testing Exaile 3.3.1 (the latest) built from my own SlackBuild. In theory it's supposed to handle iPods, but I haven't seen my friend yet to test it. Do you know if there's some specific library libipodsomething against which I have to build Exaile in order for the iPod to be recognized?

Thanks for the gtkpod suggestion. At least I know there's one working solution. In the meantime I'm looking for a bells-and-whistles audio application that integrates everything transparently, and the latest Exaile looks like a promising candidate.

I use Banshee.

It's a full fledged audio application (not sure how closely it mimics Exaile) which also does iPods

Banshee is not even listed on SlackBuilds.org, which doesn't surprise me, as it depends on Mono.

I used to have an iPod mini before moving on to a Sansa Clip+. Gtkpod worked out really well when it came to transferring files on and off that mini. If you do opt to use gtkpod, one caveat is to be careful if you later connect your iPod to someone's Mac or Windows PC running iTunes -- I used to hate how iTunes would do things like auto reorder/resort things.

You also might want to think about installing Rockbox on your iPod, then you can alternate between starting it up using either the default iPod or the Rockbox firmware. Rockbox would let your iPod just mount to your desktop as a USB device, bypassing the need for something like gtkpod, along with giving you a lot more customization features and more codec capabilities (i.e. if you have a lot of ogg files...)

I have successfully got my music on to my 5th gen' nano ipod via slack'14.0 and amarok2 [drag and drop] and then choose 'transcode' when the dialogue prompt box prompts to do so;

I have installed all relevant 'ipod' packages from sbopkg searches too.