Monday, November 22, 2010

Linux and the iPod Touch

When you had a lot of kids grow up in the house you find a lot of old ipods stuck in the corners.  We just completed a huge cleanout of kid junk in the house, and I found 2 ipods.  There was a very old ipod 30g which didn't power up at all, and an ipod touch.  I wanted to use it for some portable music on a free-standing speaker that just fit that ubiquitous ipod connector.

I had dipped into this before, and found the ipod touch had introduced a whole new encryption that Linux couldn't break at the time.  But now it has!  It was actually remarkably easy, involving some googlyizing, but Debian had all the components ready to download.  I could then use 'ifuse' and 'gtkpod' to wipe out the horrible rap music of my son, and put in Christmas music.  Of course, if there are encrypted itunes songs, then you can't really do much with them.  Such is the fun of drm!

In the end I don't really know what I did, since I went to a lot of web sites, installed a lot of stuff, and rebooted a few times before everything worked.  It really needs some simple instructions.

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