Episode: 256
Title: HPR0256: Ditching ITunes
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0256/hpr0256.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 14:54:53

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Hi. This is Ben Jarvis of Ben Jarvis.org. You probably, if you know me, you probably
know me as pixel juice from the RSC channel. And today I'm going to talk about ditching
iTunes. For the longest time, I have been on the fence about open source audio formats
like AUG and FLAC and all those beautiful little things. I know they're good. I know
it's good for you. It's like vitamins, like vegetables. They're good for you. You should
use them. You should eat them. Consume them. But it's not always convenient. And a lot of
people seem to not support them very well, especially audio players. Very few audio players
support AUG and FLAC right out of the box. So you have to make do or be very, very careful
about which ones you choose, as was talked about in one of the less to HPRs. Anyway, I picked
my digital music player before I was so concerned about things. It's an iPod, a fifth-generation
video iPod. And though I was aware of Linux, though I was running Linux, it was more
of a pastime a hobby, you know. And now I've moved on to using Linux full-time and very,
very seldom do I use Windows. I really only use Windows for a couple of things, gaming.
This one music creation system called Ableton Live, which is like the meat of what I use
the Windows systems for. And then I used iTunes to sync up my iPod with podcasts and music
and stuff, because it was just simple. And so far, everything on the Linux side was close,
but it didn't really make it for me. So I made do, and since it was going to be in Windows
most of the time, anyway, I was going to be Windows whatever, I figured I could put up
with it. Well, recently, Clot 2, you know him from here. Clot 2 has decided in his infinite
wisdom to quit making MP3s available on his website for his podcast, which is his choice.
I think that can be limiting, but hey, you know what? In the end, it was a good thing because
I said, all right, fuck it. I'm going to switch to AUG, at least I'm going to now support
AUG. And so I don't have the money to buy a new MP3 player, and I quite like the 30 gigabytes
that my MP3 player has. I like the form factor, but I don't really like the firmware. So I
decided to go back to using Rockbox, which I've used Rockbox before, but well, it was never
as good as it is now. I'll just put it that way. For those that don't know, Rockbox is a replacement
firmware that has a flat capability, AUG capability. All sorts of different audio formats. It'll
play MP3 video. It's themeable, so you can change the way it looks. It has somewhat more
sane user interface, a lot of configuration stuff. You can cross-feed, you can cross-feed,
which makes it easier if you're like meaningless into your podcast eight hours a day. They
get kind of hard on your ears. So cross-feeding is a way of making it so it doesn't hurt your
ears so much. Anyway, so Rockbox is just basically a way to replace the software that comes in an
iPod with all these cool little features. You can actually dual boot. It actually dual boots
by default. You're not going to lose anything. You're just going to switch into Rockbox when it
boots up, and if you want to switch into the old iPod firmware, so you'll put on the hold
button and then when it's booting and it'll go back. Anyway, that wasn't really the problem.
Getting Rockbox is no big deal. I've always been aware of it, but kicking iTunes is kind of a
bad habit. I mean, it's not the greatest music playing in the world, obviously. It's not ideal.
But it's a pretty good manager of music, and when you have like 10,000 tracks like I have, I mean,
I have a thousand CDs and I've ripped them all to flak, which I recommend you do. You should rip
your stuff to flak. Do it once, and then you'll never have to re-ripe a CD again, and that includes
when you want to convert to whatever the cool new format is, or if you decide like I do, or like I
did rather late in the game, that gee, I don't want MP3s anymore. I want awgs. So now I can just take
flak and do a mass conversion to awg when night while I sleep. In the morning, I'll have shiny
brand new awgs to put on my Rockbox player. But anyway, yeah, that's just my little rant there
about flak. You should really rip to flak. I know a 330 and I had discussion about this.
Some people don't care. That's fine. I personally like to rip to flak and keep it that way,
keep it clean, keep it pure. Anyway, so iTunes was a great way to manage all my music. Well,
at a certain point, that management style became less and less what I really liked, and I figured I
could do a better job, just maintaining the folders myself, and since I already do an excellent job
of tagging my files, I don't have to worry about that anymore, so whatever imports them will
create all the tags. And here and there, I found a couple extra things that would help. And before
you know it, it looks like I'd completed all the functionality that I needed iTunes to do.
Only I'd do it now in Linux. And here's pretty much what I did. First,
you want to get all your podcasts out of iTunes. Now, okay, I did it the long way. I just made a text
file that had the names of all the podcasts I listened to. And then one by one, I eventually
tracked down the URLs. I don't know. There may be a file that iTunes will spit out that has what's
called, I think it's an OPML file. It may have the list of podcasts you subscribe to. I don't
know. I do know that G Potter will import OPML, which should have all your podcasts. But anyway,
I did it the long way. If you want to do it my way, fine. Just write down all the podcasts that you
have. That's pretty much the important thing to do, because otherwise you're going to have to
figure out which podcasts you liked. And if you're like me, you probably got 20-something, 30-something,
40-something, 100-podcasts that you subscribe to. And unless you feel like pruning the list,
you're going to want to know what you're going to want to have them. So I made that list. I
double-checked everything, make sure they didn't have anything left that needed to be deleted or
moved out or anything weird like that. And then I just uninstalled iTunes and called it a day on
iTunes. Flipped over into Linux. And I was ready to go. I'm not looking back now.
Go to rockbox.org. I think that's what's called. I don't know. Just look it up. It's in Google.
You know how to do this stuff. But anyway, find the Rockbox website. You can download an installer
from there. And you can then run that. It's a QT app. It should run on just about anything.
I don't think it needs any requirements or anything. It's just a binary blob.
I recommend running it as pseudo, because I had to do that under Ubuntu. I'm running standard
vanilla Ubuntu. And I had to run it as a pseudo. And then it'll find your iPod when you
detect it. And then you just click the little, please, yes, may I install Rockbox button.
And after a little bit of dancing, it'll install it on your iPod. And you may or may not get themes.
When I did it, the theme site was a little screwy. And it couldn't get themes installed. But
basically, the themes are skins. Stuff to make it look pretty. By default, the Cabby 2 skin
is pretty good. It looks alright. I mean, you're going to want to probably change it because, you know,
you want to be original and stuff and you're cool. But Cabby 2 is pretty good. Which is great,
because it's not going to look like an iPod anymore on the screen, which all your friends are going to
go, what the hell's that? Anyway, it's still an iPod in form factor, but it's not an iPod in function.
Anyway, so you may or may not need to get themes. It'll probably install some games. It'll install
a bunch of little extra things, fonts and stuff. But it'll take a couple of seconds, like,
I think 30 seconds, maybe to do the whole thing. And then once that's installed, it'll reboot,
and you'll see your fancy new Rockbox firmware. And from now on, you don't have to use
the old iTunes syncing method to connect that device to your computer. Just plug it in. And it
accesses it like a hard drive. Which is great, because that means all you have to do is copy files
over, like you would from any file to any hard drive. So once the files are on the Rockbox player,
you can either go to the file section and look them up, or you can have the database running,
which you'll add them to the database and create a database from the tags. And then that works
kind of like the iPod, where you just search by album or artist or genre or whatever.
And the cool thing is, is now you can take your creative commons licensed music, which you're
allowed to share to somebody else's house on your iPod, plug it in, and then just drag and drop.
You don't have to use any weird tools to try and recover it from your player. Anyway, so now that you
have your Rockbox iPod, and you have the means to put music on it, and you can play some music,
let's get those podcasts working. So there's a variety of ways to do this. One popular way is to
use Bash Potter, which is a command-lined oriented pod catcher made by Link of the Linux Link
Tech Show. And that's a good, good program. I personally wanted to have something that did a little
more than just that. So I got G-Potter. G-Potter is graphical, it uses GTK. And basically it is,
it follows the Unix mentality of that it's just for pod catching. It doesn't do any other,
any other music management, it just just gets podcasts. But the additional thing that it does
do that's related, is it'll put the podcasts, casts a catch, catches on your music device,
whether that be iPod, or an iPod with Rockbox, or whatever you want to call it, whatever you
happen to have a Sansa, whatever some Chong brand from Hong Kong. And as long as it can connect to
your computer, then you can use G-Potter to put stuff on it. So what G-Potter does is you add,
you have to find, this is a pain in the ass, you have to track down all the URLs for all those
websites and podcasts that you were looking at before that you made that list of. And put those
URLs in the G-Potter Add URL field, click the Add URL, and then it'll go there, it'll give you a
fancy list of all the podcasts that they're showing, and it'll set the newest one for download.
And once you've completed adding in all those URLs, you can just click the Download button.
Or actually, click Check, check up, and it'll go and check to make sure everything is up to date.
And then you can click Download, and it'll queue them all up and download them all down. And once you
have them, it throws them into a little folder. Now, the folder is a little weird because the guy,
if you listen Linux Outlaws, he explains it a little better than I can. But let's just say to make
sure that he doesn't accidentally override a file or make any mistake. The only way he could find
to actually store these files was to create a hash from their file names. And the hash would then
be used to create file names and directories. So if you look inside your podcast directory that
you're saving them to, it's gonna look like a bunch of garbage. But that's okay because when they
get transferred to your iPod or whatever device, it will create, or it can create names using the tags
from inside the file. So you'll get that. And like I said, Rockbox is going to scan the MP3s for tags.
Anyway, so it's going to, you're going to see the tags, which podcasters please, for my sake,
and maybe other people's, I don't know if you know this, but I, hey, just call me crazy, but I like
podcasts to have the genre podcast. That way, when I'm looking at my device, I can just go to
genres, go to podcasts, and all the podcasts that I want to listen to are in the same place. And I
can just go through and look at them. That's just me, you know, I mean, that's a personal preference.
Hopefully some people agree with me and think that that's a good method. But you know, you may have,
if you like that, and they don't do it, you're going to have to probably add that tag yourself. Anyway,
you know, it's, it's going to create names of tags and all that stuff. So, so, okay. So where was I?
Oh, yeah. So it's downloading the files. It's got all the files. You can click the little button that
says, update or sync or whatever it says. And it'll put the files onto your bipod. Now, there's
a lot of ways it'll deal with deleting files. I like to keep it simple. I have it synced the files
to my iPod, then delete the files it synced on the computer. So now the files are on the iPod
and off the computer. And then as I listen to podcasts, I'm going to delete them off of my MP3
player. Okay. So because that's awesome about rockbox, it has the functionality to delete files too,
which for some stupid reason the iPod doesn't do. I think that's something to do with their database
structure anyway. So yeah, I that's how I do it because it's real, very simple. I want to listen
the podcasts. I'm going to eventually get around to listening to them. They don't need to be on my
computer. They're on the iPod. Great. Okay. So that takes care of like 90% of the functionality of
iTunes and right there. So, okay, mission accomplished. I'm already mostly there. The last thing that
iTunes does pretty well, not nearly as well as other programs, but pretty well, is MP3 tagging,
or MP3 tagging because iTunes only deals with MP3s. But the best program I've run into is actually
called MP3 tag and it's for Windows, not for Linux unfortunately. But I'm keeping this all Linux
and I've ditched since ditched MP3 tag under wine because I found a program that's as good if not
better, just slightly harder to use. That's easy tag. It's got kind of a convoluted user interface.
I'll say that. It works, but it could be easier if they were to take the same models MP3 tag. I think
that would be good. Just keep the same features, but the interface of MP3 tag would be would be a
better improvement. But anyway, what easy tag is, it's a full featured tagging program allows you
to tag your MP3s or org files or flak files or whatever. And it also does things like mass
renaming, mass moving, mass numbering. Just a little bit more than your average everyday music
program does. I use Excel as my desktop music player, which kind of is how I keep track of my music
is with that. And it's okay, it does a lot, but it's not really all that great for mass tagging.
In Amorock, I never really got used to Amorock's tagging stuff. So for my money, easy tag is the best.
It does exactly what I want it to do, and it does it really well. And it's very configurable.
The only thing like I said, it's got kind of a steep learning curve. So spend a little bit of time
with easy tag. All these are in the repose group on two. And if you're not running a bun two,
I'm sure you can find them in your package manager. They're very, very common programs.
But that's pretty much the story of how I ditched iTunes. And now I only use my Windows program,
I mean my Windows partition, very, very infrequently. When I have the mood strikes me to make music,
and I might even start ditching that. If Ableton Live doesn't want to get their act together and
get a Linux version, I made them ditching them too. Which means the only thing I need to worry about
is Warcraft. And I think I can run Warcraft on Linux on my desktop, because the Intel graphics card
on this laptop doesn't run it well under Linux. So hopefully by the before too long, I will be
completely Windows-free. That's the goal at least. But yeah, so thank you for listening. I hope
you enjoyed it. You can catch me at BenJarvis.org, or I'm in the IRC as Pixel Juice. And thanks for
listening.