2nd Gen iPod Shuffle Adventures on Linux, Part 1
I got a new iPod Shuffle the other day. I never really saw the need to have a stand-alone music player until recently when I went to pick up my wife from her class. I was sitting in the car for more than two hours with nothing to do. I don’t have a car stereo yet and my Motorola V3x can play MP3’s but it has a limit to what it can play. Anything with a bitrate of over 192Kbps will not play on the V3x. Most of my collection (which I ripped from CD’s that I actually own, thank you very much) are in VBR and “Very High Quality”. It also sucks when you’re just humming along and suddenly the music stops because there’s a call or a text message.
I have the nice little 2nd gen version. And of course, the first thing I did was look up “ipod shuffle linux” on Google. Apparently, Apple likes Linux a lot less than it likes Microsoft as there are a lot of iPod Shuffle owners with a lot of complaints that it does not work under Linux. I have been using iTunes 7.6 on Windows XP to load the thing with some music. It appears that the Windows version of iTunes is buggy as it consistently seems to crash for no apparent reason. Thankfully, I haven’t ended up with a corrupted iPod firmware yet.
I run Linux on my desktop every day. It sucks having to reboot to Windows XP just to change the songs on the iPod Shuffle. So today I decided to take the risk and plugged in the thing while I was running Linux. Surprisingly, it appears to work without problems. There’s the little iPod icon on my desktop, Rhythmbox started and I can browse the files on it.
I read somewhere that Banshee has a nicer interface compared to Rhythmbox so I fired up Banshee, and there it was on the sidebar. Banshee popped up a notice that my iPod was not recognized and asked if I wanted to submit information about my device, which I did. Finally, Banshee complained that the iPod database on the thing was in a new format that it does not recognize and asked if I wanted to regenerate to an older format. I regenerated the database, ejected, played a few songs with no problems.
Next, using Rhythmbox, I tried erasing the existing songs and load it with some other songs. Tried putting on about 500MB worth of stuff in there and it took longer than usual and I was getting some entries on syslog:
Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179189] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel
Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179259] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel
Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179729] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel
The indicator light kept blinking orange, I left it as it was for a few more minutes and it kept on blinking. I clicked on the Eject button on the Rhythmbox toolbar and removed it from the dock. I plugged in the earphones and tried to play but it still played the old stuff that I had already erased. I think I may have missed something so I plugged it in again, Rhythmbox comes up again and when I check the songs listed they are the songs that I thought I had already erased, plus the songs that I loaded. So I erased everything again, tried loading in two albums making sure to load something completely different. This time, upon loading the second album halfway through, Rhythmbox started to complain that there no space left on the drive. I ejected it and tried to plug it in again. This time Rhythmbox would crash.
Feb 18 11:08:44 iwojima kernel: [ 7748.924343] rhythmbox[8986]: segfault at 000000000000000c rip 00002aaaabb13299 rsp 00007fffd1a4c100 error 4
Banshee can no longer see the device too. Uh-oh! At this point the thing keeps blinking orange until I eject it by right-clicking on the desktop icon and ejecting it from there.
Time to reboot to Windows…