I got my iPod Classic to work with Amarok

It was a bit harder than I expected it to be (the new iPods are apparently encrypted somehow to prevent anything but iTunes from syncing with it), but now it’s working perfectly. It even downloaded all of my cover art.

Basically, all I had to do was compile a new version of libgpod and run a few commands. The one in the Ubuntu repositories that was automatically installed by apt-get is outdated, so I had to download the source here and compile it.
Here are the commands I used:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libsgutils1-dev checkinstall
tar -zxvf libgpod-0.6.0.tar.gz
cd libgpod-0.6.0
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall

I entered some random description and set the name to “libgpod2.” Only a few more steps after that:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libgpod.so.3 /usr/lib/libgpod.so.2
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libgpod.so.3 /usr/lib/libgpod.so.3
ipod-read-sysinfo-extended /dev/[ipod device address] /media/[your ipod device name]

After that I reinstalled amarok, though I’m not sure if it was necessary. Amarok now has more options for iPod models to choose from, and I just picked iPod Classic and it connected perfectly. Yay!

Thanks to the guys at the Ubuntu Forums.

Posted by probabilityZero on December 26, 2007 | Filed under: Tech and games