Many people are afraid you use Linux because they think that their beloved iPod may not work on the Operating System. This however could not be further from the truth, and from the oldest iPods to the newest iPads, Linux as an Operating System will handle them.
This guide is based on using your Apple machine along side Pinguy/Ubuntu/Mint and variants, and should be almost identical for any other version of Linux that you may use. The version of Banshee that we will be looking at will be 2.0 and above, and it is recommended that you are using the newest version of your Operating System.
Think of Banshee as iTunes for Linux and you can’t go wrong. The first thing that many of you will want to do is put the songs from your existing iPod onto your PC, thus also backing up all your music.
Before you plug in your iPod, make sure you go into the options in Banshee and select Edit>Preferences>General and tick all the options in “File Policies”. Plug in your iPod and let Banshee do its job. Depending on how much music you have on the iPod, and how fast your disk-drives work will depend on how long the transfer takes. For me, 40GB of music took around 40 minutes to transfer. As I said, it could be different for you when you first sync your music.
During the initial sync operation, you may think that Banshee has stopped responding. It hasn’t, it is still doing its job, so just leave it do its own thing. If for any reason that you stop Banshee from working, you can re-start Banshee and just do a re-scan and it will continue from where it left off. Once you have synced everything into Banshee, all your music will be nicely labelled in new folders and will be easy for you maintain in the future.
Ripping or downloading music and putting it into Banshee, and then putting it straight onto your iPod is a similar affair. The easiest method I find is to go into the “Media menu”, then select Media>Import Media>Folders and let Banshee add the music that way. Banshee will add the album to your Banshee music folder and it will again be nicely organised.
Make sure your iPod is plugged in and let it do its initial sync. The easiest method then is to simply drag the album you want to your iPods “Music” folder. It’s simple and very effective. Don’t forget before you do this though to add the albums cover-art if it has already not done that automatically. If Banshee fails to add cover-art, or it is the wrong cover-art, simply choose the album you want the cover-art for, and then on the bottom left hand corner where the cover-art is displayed, right click on this and choose “Choose New Cover Art”. I find Google is my friend and it has never let me down on album covers.
As far as iPods and other media players go, I have tried a couple of different versions of iPod, generic MP3 players and Android devices which all seem to work with no problems. As I said earlier, make sure that you are using the latest edition of your Operating System and the latest version of Banshee to ensure that your iPod is compatible.
Mark Adams
August 14th 2011
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