Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

Random hardware

I was given a brand-new iPod shuffle this weekend (thanks Che!). Not only do I now get the fresh experience of owning technology that’s not already considered obsolete, I also haven’t owned a piece of personal stereo technology since the crappy generic-brand personal cassette player I had when I was 13.

While I’m not a Apple design fetishist, it is a lovely little object. And its smaller, cheaper, simpler approach is more in line with my own tastes in personal tech than the previous models. And the lanyard will make it ideal for some kind of… exercise. Importing the high-octane electronica soundtracks from first-person shooters and racing games should do the trick.

And really, it only looks like a sinister techno-cult talisman when worn over a black turtleneck.

Unlike, well, almost everyone I know, I’ve never spent weeks ripping and encoding my CD collection. I could never spare the cycles to run MP3 players, so I let the Napster revolution pass me by. And since I don’t use Windows or OSX at home, I’m certainly not going to be using iTunes any time soon.

So my first job was to rip my CDs - apt-get sound-juicer, a fairly straight-forward CD ripper for Gnome. Sound Juicer, by default, rips tracks into to the hacker’s choice audio format, Ogg Vorbis. Sadly the Shuffle won’t play these directly, so .oggs would need to be transcoded before being synced to the iPod. And juicer doesn’t support Apple’s favoured MPEG4 AAC codec (although an FAAC plugin exists for the gstreamer framework it’s built on). So it’s back to the lingua franca of digital audio distribution, MP3.

But, of course, the pure Debian distribution doesn’t support MP3 encoding out-of-the-box (as it were). But like various other codecs and other programs affected by patent issues, support can be added by adding a repository (tainted with the stench of practical compromise) to your apt sources.list.

But even admitting these sites exist is a betrayal of the free software movement. So I won’t.

But, since the devil makes all the best digital media, you’ll probably already have added one, and thus the following should do the trick:

The next task is getting linux to talk to the iPod. Fortunately, upon plugging it into a USB socket, it presents itself as a virginal USB mass storage device and thus appears as a fresh SCSI disk on the system. Since it uses the variable naming of the removable SCSI devices, we need to set up a dynamic symlink using udev by adding the following into /etc/udev/rules.d/local.rules:

Then mkdir /media/ipod, add the following to /etc/fstab and restart udev

I then apt-got gtkpod which gives a graphical playlist manager allowing syncing. Sadly the latest release predates the launch of the shuffle, and it emerges that the shuffle uses a different database than the disk based iPods, thus older software can read the data on the shuffle, but it can’t modify it.

Fortunately for me a short-term solution has appeared, since those dedicated ipod-owning perl-hackers have, this last weekend, released GNUpod version 0.98,  collection of ipod management scripts now with Shuffle support.

And I’m all set. Hurrah!