apple ipod touch 1g on slackware shows garbled filenames for my music files

nitecrawler · 01-12-2015, 08:07 AM

well, first of all these couple of posts gladly helped me to set up my ipod and see the files...
*and no i dont need syncing ever never then nor now or ever again....

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...13-1-a-865365/

http://rawatmukul.tumblr.com/post/9052393236

thanks folks...

i can access my music directory of the ipod from cli....
now, the issue i face is that in my music directory my folders are named as F00,F01,F02 and so on....
in them the files have garbage names basically weird names like ZFIJ.mp3 or YSIC.mp3 etc....

they all play correctly though in mplayer when i tested it.....the files are correct and i can see their detailed info in mplayer on playing...anyone got a clue y these names??
encoding go wrong in the directory?
*by the way the directory i access my music is /my_ipod/Music

so, i need to know now how can i transfer files?which folder do i transfer to?how do i know?

nitecrawler · 01-12-2015, 08:39 AM

just came across this article and yes thats my issue kind of the same....
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...es-4175509692/

dint like the way hunterjoz handled there of copying back and forth from google play...y wud i give my music to google....it aint happening till say its impossible for lady starlight to show me the file names correctly...
no offence meant to joz but is there any other way?

schneidz · 01-12-2015, 09:00 AM

seems like apple's way of guaranteeing their customers reliance on itunes and discourage looking for alternatives... (imagine having to rename 1000's of itunes files to normal track#-artist-song title-album.flac names).

i would use a program like

Code:

mplayer -endpos 0 music/machal-mantano--single-forever.mp3 | egrep "Title:|Artist:|Album:|Year:|Comment:|Track:|Genre:"

in a loop to bash out a mass file rename script.

nitecrawler · 01-12-2015, 09:22 AM

as my files and folders have these weird names i have no clue what to rename each file to unless i play it on mplayer and see the output displayed there on my terminal which has the song name and yes the artist genre etc..
now i cant do this for each song....would take me ages!!!

so here is my heirarchy now.
one directory say like:
/my_iod/Music/F00/

WTFN.mp3
WTFH.mp3 and so on

and also where to transfer my mp3 files to ipod?i mean to which folder do i transfer?do i make a new folder?just confused...what to do next?

yes apple is just making it hard for linux users...kind of cat and mouse game...where they keep changing to make it broken or non-compatible for linux and once someone gets hold of it, back to drawing board and change it again...

bassmadrigal · 01-12-2015, 10:27 AM

I'm prefacing this with stating that it is Windows software, and I've never tested it under WINE, but I have used it extensively on Windows to manage large amounts of music.

Have you tried MP3Tag? It is able to read ID3 tags (I'm assuming that's what mplayer is showing) and use them to generate filenames (and can do a lot more too).

According to and ubuntu geek article, it has the following limitations if you choose to run it under WINE:

Quote:

Whilst it works, it's still a compromise because it cannot handle case sensitivity, cannot rename folders and filenames and path lengths are limited to Windows file system restrictions.

I just found out that there's a program called puddletag which is very similar to mp3tag and is opensource. There's even a slackbuild for it. Hopefully this can take your tags and then use them to generate a filename (and probably even a rudimentary folder structure if desired). It even supports musicbrainz.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/audio/puddletag/

dugan · 01-12-2015, 11:12 AM

Use gtkpod to transfer them.

schneidz · 01-12-2015, 12:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nitecrawler

as my files and folders have these weird names i have no clue what to rename each file to unless i play it on mplayer and see the output displayed there on my terminal which has the song name and yes the artist genre etc..
now i cant do this for each song....would take me ages!!!

so here is my heirarchy now.
one directory say like:
/my_iod/Music/F00/

WTFN.mp3
WTFH.mp3 and so on

and also where to transfer my mp3 files to ipod?i mean to which folder do i transfer?do i make a new folder?just confused...what to do next?

yes apple is just making it hard for linux users...kind of cat and mouse game...where they keep changing to make it broken or non-compatible for linux and once someone gets hold of it, back to drawing board and change it again...

theres probably a few id3 tag programs. i think you misunderstood my suggestion. you can call mplayer in a bash script within a loop. it will take a few minutes to rename about 1000 songs (it would probably take inexperienced programmer about a day to write).

any type of programming is a useful skill and easier to learn with practical practice.

nitecrawler · 01-12-2015, 06:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

I just found out that there's a program called puddletag which is very similar to mp3tag and is opensource. There's even a slackbuild for it. Hopefully this can take your tags and then use them to generate a filename (and probably even a rudimentary folder structure if desired). It even supports musicbrainz

will check on this and be back soon with the results...thanks...

Quote:

Originally Posted by schneidz

theres probably a few id3 tag programs

thats what i'd b looking....well puddletag for the test first...

and gtkpod well am not a fan of gui...keeping the option very much open like i said anything to see her clear those filenames for me....

nitecrawler · 01-12-2015, 06:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by schneidz

you can call mplayer in a bash script within a loop. it will take a few minutes to rename about 1000 songs (it would probably take inexperienced programmer about a day to write).

any type of programming is a useful skill and easier to learn with practical practice.

i just dont want to rename all the songs....i want to rename based on the meta tag data...as mentioned earlier i got garbage value as name for my mp3s....

what about the directory? how do i know which directory it is?and no they are not sorted based on playlist, genre type nothing...just all mixed as groups of files in folders....

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

I just found out that there's a program called puddletag which is very similar to mp3tag and is opensource.

sorry, tried the same and no it dint help much....

Paulo2 · 01-12-2015, 10:11 PM

You can try easytag, there's a slackbuild https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG/Screenshots
It is a little difficult to understand how it works, but it works fine.
You can edit tag fields from file name, or rename files from tag fields.

Or you can use id3lib package (also there is a slackbuild, it is an easytag dependency)
directly from cli, reading tag content to rename the files.
id3info output is like this

Code:

id3info unknown.mp3 

*** Tag information for unknown.mp3
=== TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Summertime
=== TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Big Brother & The Holding Company
=== TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Cheap Thrills
=== TYER (Year): 1968
=== TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 03
=== TCON (Content type): Blues
*** mp3 info
MPEG1/layer III
Bitrate: 192KBps
Frequency: 44KHz

Get fields values

Code:

$ file=$(id3info unknown.mp3)

$ track=$([[ $(grep TRCK <<<"$file") =~ :\ ([0-9]+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
$ echo \'$track\'
'03'

$ title=$([[ $(grep TIT2 <<<"$file") =~ :\ (.+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
$ echo \'$title\'
'Summertime'

$ album=$([[ $(grep TALB <<<"$file") =~ :\ (.+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
$ echo \'$album\'
'Cheap Thrills'

$ year=$([[ $(grep TYER <<<"$file") =~ :\ (.+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
$ echo \'$year\'
'1968'

$ artist=$([[ $(grep TPE1 <<<"$file") =~ :\ (.+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]})
$ echo \'$artist\'
'Big Brother & The Holding Company'

With this vars just rename the file and create dirs
mv unknown.mp3 "$track. $title".mp3
mkdir -p "$artist"/"$year $album"

You may want to do it in a loop like schneidz said

file by file will be very slow.
And with easytag you can edit all files in one directory at same time.

bassmadrigal · 01-13-2015, 06:48 AM

Are there ID3 tags stored on the files? If the metadata isn't stored on the files and is instead maintained in an internal database in the ipod, your only option is to use an ipod interfacing software like gtkpod. None of these ID3 reading softwares will help.

Paulo2 · 01-13-2015, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

Are there ID3 tags stored on the files? If the metadata isn't stored on the files and is instead maintained in an internal database in the ipod, your only option is to use an ipod interfacing software like gtkpod. None of these ID3 reading softwares will help.

If that's the case, is this database plain text or is binary/encrypted/proprietary?
I never handled an ipod (or any Apple product).

bassmadrigal · 01-13-2015, 08:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paulo2

If that's the case, is this database plain text or is binary/encrypted/proprietary?
I never handled an ipod (or any Apple product).

I don't own any Apple products (although, my wife has an iPhone that doesn't touch my computers -- but she uses Pandora (even though I have a All-Access subscription through Google) and doesn't store music on it and only uses itunes to update it when needed). I was only speculating that if they don't use any metadata in the file itself, it'd have to be stored in an internal database on the device. I doubt it would be encrypted since they have apps like gtkpod to interact with the device (although, it looks like it is limited on what devices it can interact with and what iOS versions, so I suppose some could be encrypted, but it'd likely just be something proprietary that hasn't been figured out yet). It'd be nice if it just uses an sqlite database, but I don't know.

schneidz · 01-13-2015, 10:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paulo2

If that's the case, is this database plain text or is binary/encrypted/proprietary?
I never handled an ipod (or any Apple product).

its definately not plain text. its in some bizarro proprietary format that apple changes frequently with some itunes updates to break hax0rz that sync to their devices:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post5116217

schmatzler · 01-13-2015, 11:01 AM

You can try syncing your music with Banshee. Packages for -current64 and SlackBuilds are in my signature. It uses libimobiledevice for accessing files on Apple devices and should work up to iOS 8.1.2, according to their website.