Geek Drivel

I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin. – Stephen Bayne

At the end of my last iPod Touch entry, I mentioned that I was going to try jailbreaking the Touch so I could load music onto it from Linux, instead of relying on a VMware Windows machine.

I did so. Everything seemed to work with no problem, but after I loaded any song into it, the Touch claimed that it had no music on it at all, and iTunes said that I had to restore it to factory settings before it would even look at it again (which involves rebooting into the full version of Windows, and about 45 minutes of restoring various things). After the fourth failed attempt, I stumbled across a note on the Ubuntu forums that explained the problem: Apple has changed the hash algorithm they’re using for the database. Again.

Why? I don’t understand the purpose behind it, since it does nothing but cause problems for people (their customers!) who are trying to load music onto the device without going through iTunes, and pretty much the only people who want to do that are people using Linux. If it were Microsoft doing it, I’d understand it — discriminating against anything non-Windows is part of their culture — but Apple already supports Windows as well, so it can’t be a matter of OS snobbery. I know Apple is a control-freak about some things, but that doesn’t sufficiently explain it.

In any case, someone will figure out the new algorithm soon, and update the Linux software to account for it. Until then, I’ve found a way to move my playlists from RhythmBox (my Linux music player) to iTunes* to get them onto the Touch, so I suppose I can keep using iTunes for now. It’s just an extra (and unnecessary) step.

[* It requires exporting the playlists to m3u format, running sed over them to change the filenames to Windows drive-letter format, then importing them into iTunes, which is using the same on-disk music library.]