Syncing your iPod in Linux

For the last few days I have been struggling to find some program that would nicely sync with my iPod and put everything into the proper directories like iTunes does on Windows. I wanted my audiobooks to show up under audiobooks and Podcast under Podcasts and so on.

I have tried many programs and ended up trying to get iTunes to run under wine, which after much work I succeded in doing only to find that the two most useful features, CD importing and iPod syncing, didn’t work! Therefore I went back to Amarok, one of the first programs I had tried and hadn’t had much luck with and looked into it a little more closely. I found that it really works quite well.

After figuring out how do get Amarok to work with my iPod I found a site that gives very good instructions on how to do it. You can visit the site here. There are a couple of points however that I would like to expand on.

The first is that when selecting the iPod from the Configuration >> Media Devices in step 2 the mount point the Amarok tries to use may not be correct. I had previously named my iPod and so my mount point was different.

To check what mount point Amarok is using click on “Details”

To check the actual mount point of your iPod, go to Places >> Computer and right click on your iPod and click on “Properties.” Go to the “Volume” tab. The mount point should be listed there.

If the mount points are the same, great! If not, remove the entry in Amarok and click “Add Device…”

Select “Apple iPod Media Device” from the drop down menu and fill in the name and mount point.

Click “OK”

Now you can continue with the instructions on the simplehelp website.

The other point is that there is one more way to add media to your iPod.  This method is especially useful when syncing audio that Amarok will not play such as the Audible .aa format.  Simply right click on the file and select “Transfer to Media Device”  this will add the music to the sync queue.

Everything has worked beautifully!  All of my music appears on my iPod exactly as it did when syncing with iTunes!

To visit one more site that I have found to have a lot of useful informatin regarding iPods and Amarok click here.