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Apple has made it as difficult as they could to sync the iPod Touch and iPhone to any application other than iTunes. As a result, syncing an iPod Touch or iPhone in Linux is still no easy task.
In Mac and Windows, you can easily sync your iPhone/iPod Touch with iTunes, but in Linux, there is no easy way to sync your iDevice’s music library with any of the media player. Even if you are willing to jailbreak your phone, there are still plenty of complicated steps that you need to do to get the syncing to work. With the release of iFuse (and a bunch of other library), things have changed.
Since there is no Linux version of iTunes, Linux users have to fall back on gtkpod, Amarok, Rhythmbox or Banshee to sync their iPOD. However, in the later version of iPOD, which include iPOD Classic and iPOD nano 3rd gen, there is a change in the firmware that resulted in conflict between iPOD and the syncing software. While it is possible to transfer songs from Amarok (and other software) to the iPOD, the iPOD just don’t register any songs in it.
Apple may open up its iPhone and iPod touch devices to third-party apps next month, but the chances that Linux users will get invited to the party are slim at best.
I’m close to my goal of being able to manage my iPod Touch completely without iTunes on Ubuntu. HandBrakeCLI (HandBrake’s command line interface) for Linux encodes excellent quality video, and although it runs in the terminal is simple to use.
The Apple iPad has finally arrived, and, as I predicted a while back, it's really just a big iPod Touch. That's great. I love my iPod Touch. But, really, is there anything here that Linux can't do just as well for less money?
libimobiledevice is a FOSS software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone ® and iPod Touch ® devices on Linux. Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking.
Personally, I never considered album art for my iPod all that important. That has changed now that we have an iPod touch in the family. If I'm missing a lot of album art, the experience of virtually flipping through my music collection, something Apple calls "cover flow," is diminished. iTunes doesn't always offer art for albums I didn't purchase from iTunes. Thankfully, a little GPL-licensed application called Album Cover Art Downloader (ACAD) solved my problem.
