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Comment by postfuturist | Hacker News Reader

My Iphone 3GS now syncs with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 10.04 straight out of the box.

I wish I could be excited about that, but because the iPod and iTunes don't support FLAC I have to maintain duplicate, MP3-encoded copies of all of my FLAC-encoded files, and I don't want the duplicates cluttering up my Rhythmbox library.

So, sticking with iTunes via WinXP in VirtualBox here, sadly.

Don't try to upgrade an iPhone this way though: you will lock it up and will have to restore it via Windows running natively.

I've successfully upgraded my first-gen iPhone through VirtualBox several times.

You just have to babysit it and re-enable the device in the USB list after each time it restarts.

I had an issue with an iPhone 3G upgrading from 3.1.2. to 3.1.3. After iTunes did its thing to put it in a mode where it was ready to accept the new image, Ubuntu refused to see it as a USB device. May have been a fluke, but I'm not trying it that way again.

You'll love this:

MP3FS is A read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes audio formats (currently FLAC) to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. This was written to enable me to use my FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands MP3. e.g. gmediaserver to a netgear MP101 mp3 player.

http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/

I have a ~/mp3_music directory which provides an exact duplicate of ~/music except for transcoding non-mp3 audio files on read. It's seriously kickass.

Yup, you (and the author) just made my day. Thanks!

That is killer. To think of the hell I had to go through to get my iPod touch to sync a year ago.

Is this specific of Ubuntu or is upstream with Rhytmbox?

I think it is probably upstream with a bunch of libraries used by Rhythmbox that, as far as I know, were experimental a few months when last I tried to get that to work (unsuccessfully).

It uses this library: http://libimobiledevice.org/

So presumably, it's available to one and all, regardless of distro. (At least until Apple gets wind of it...)

That was one of the last things keeping Windows on my machine.

Just tried it with a first gen not-jailbroken iPod Touch. Worked beautifuly, with cover art auto-downloaded by Rythmbox and all.

I'll go as far as saying the experience is WAY better with Rythmbox then using iTunes.

Will it do that without breaking an existing sync connection to iTunes?

Except it doesn't actually rebuild the itunes db on the phone when you add new music to it, right?

I'm not sure what you mean by "rebuild the itunes db." The songs show up in the Itunes player on the Iphone as soon as they are loaded.

Great! Earlier versions would place the mp3s on the iPhone but they would not show up in iTunes which made it useless.

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