Music

Music is pretty much an essential element of the human existence.

Install RockBox on your music player. RockBox is firmware for music players. That means it's the brains for your "mp3 player" or "ipod". After installing RockBox, you'll want to call it a music / media player because your device will support much more than the mp3 format.

There are many brands that support the free ogg file format straight from the factory.

But the RockBox software is even cooler. It is completely configurable to do what you want it to do. It will even talk to you so that you can hear the menu instead of squinting at the tiny screen in broad daylight while driving in traffic (not that anybody ever does that).

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The only "problem" is that not all players support ogg, and RockBox is not developed to support all players.

Ipod on Linux

Initialize your iPod first by using a Mac or Windows computer plus the iTunes software. Any content you added prior to initializing the iPod will be lost in the process so do this FIRST

I was given a 3rd Generation iPod nano video (4GB). The hardware is impressive. The software requirements and license agreement(s) to be able to use the hardware are ridiculous. In the end, I had to use a Windows computer to download and install iTunes software in order to register the device and have it initialized (which erased all the content that I had already put onto it.)

Amarok does a good job of managing the contents of an iPod. However, it didn't seem to offer a way to load a video onto the device. That's when I found Floola. Floola isn't open source, so it's questionable as to how long it will be available. Also odd is that the developer Tomas Camin has a clone product and website http://www.yamipod.com

I'll have to check whether Amarok or GTKpod support for my iPod is better now that I've initialized it with iTunes.

Related

• Life Hacker has a good article on using iPod without iTunes
• http://freephile.com/cms/content/music
• Handbrake can be used to convert a DVD movie to mp4 format (to be viewed on your iPod). Or, you could read the details of how it's done until you have a Master's degree in muxology. Seriously, you don't have the time. Get Handbrake.