music is getting around

So I finally broke down and got a new iPod the other day. I got the 120GB Classic. "Casey," you may ask, "aren't you all Ubuntu at home? Why would you get a closed-source, fancy-pants iPod?"

I'll tell you why: iPods are nice. My last one, a 2nd gen 10GB, just died. Finally. Some people buy toys, get fancy accessories, and baby them. Not me. I used the crappy case it came in, for about a year, and after that, threw it in my school bag or pocket, and went through a year of grad school in it. I was not gentle. I ran that thing dead, or close to it, most days of the week. I had to get the headphone jack fixed once (due to a design flaw which they fixed in later models) but that was the only problem I ever had with it. It even once got half immersed in lemonade overnight, but I just let it dry out, and all was good, though the buttons were a bit sticky. That was years ago.

In short, it was easy to use, I used in constantly, and it took the beating. I was sold on it.

However, all good things come to an end, and it was no different. I am still not entirely sure if it was the battery being completely gone, or the disk, but in any case, I wanted a new one since I had outgrown 10GB, and it was a pain to add new music. Which brings us to the present day...

I went to the apple store at lunch, picked the new one up (silver, not black), and took it home. Booted up windows, got the latest iTunes, plugged it in, and made sure the software was up to date. Rebooted to Ubuntu. Plugged the iPod in, fired up Amarok, mimicked the settings I had for my shuffle, connected, and loaded an album. (Incidentally, it was Minor Threat's “First Two 7"s”, just to keep with that DIY spirit) Ejected. It played. Perfectly.

Nice.

Caveats: The album artwork did not go over. I checked the tags, and not all the songs had the artwork, so I grabbed a well-tagged album. Still no luck. Ok, no worries, I can figure this out later. I also have not tried loading photos or video.

At this juncture, I figure all that stuff is gravy. I really just wanted an mp3 player that I could use to travel with all my tunes (currently about 37GB and growing). I am guessing in another five years this will all be on my phone, but for now, given past history, this is/should be the solution.

Act II:

You may remember from earlier posts that I had transported all my music to work, 1 or 2 GB at a time, to have on my work machine. I did this since my iPod had poor battery life. I like this setup, since I have some big studio headphones at work, and I like having it all there. Less to carry back and forth. Anyways... at the time I was moving stuff, I had not unlocked my iTunes and Audible content, so was using iTunes to listen to it all. I didn't have a lot of locked up tracks, but some, and it was newer stuff, so I wanted it available. I have since unlocked the works, at home, and have cleaned up some tags in the process. I wanted all that at work, but I didn't want to move it all piecemeal. I now had a solution.

Since all my stuff at home was unlocked, decently tagged, and organized, I simply dragged my ~/Music folder onto the mounted iPod. When I got to work, I uninstalled iTunes (no need for that anymore, and I suspect it was jamming me from sharing the folder my tunes are in), renamed my current music folder (always have backups), mounted the iPod, and dragged the Music folder from my iPod (which was mounted as an external drive, since iTunes wasn't there to lock it up) to C:\. I then decided to kick it old-school, and installed winamp. Oh yeah, that's right kids, I went back to your grandpa's mp3 playing windows app. That's how we did it back in my day. I set the local media folder during setup, and voilà! DRM-free tunes for me! A couple clicks later, read-only access was granted for everyone on the network. Sharing is caring, after all.

Dénouement:

I now have a lighter weight method of listening to and sharing my music at work. I am going back to PA this weekend, and I have a convenient way to take and listen to whatever I want on the way; planning out what I may or may not want to hear on two five and a half hour drives through western Mass. and upstate New York is no longer something I need to do. I have a new toy. If having all my music wasn't fun enough, I also now have a project: I need to get album covers, photos, and videos syncing from Ubuntu.

Sometimes you got to love being a geek.