Gtkpod Hangs

[Ylan Segal]

Yesterday, I tried connecting my iPod (20Gb with Click wheel, no video)
 to my Ubuntu (Dapper). What I want is 1) to get all the music currently
on my iPod to my Ubuntu box and 2) eventually be able to add new music
and generally manage my iPod.

>From the advice on this list and the Dapper documentation I gathered
that I first needed to use Gtkpod to copy my music in the iPod. Here is
what I did:

- Connected iPod to computer (Sony Vaio laptop, by the way, but I don't
think it matters).
- Ubuntu instantly recognizes the iPod, mounts is and opens up
Rhythmbox, which scans the iPod and displays its contents. I can even
play the music in the iPod directly through Rhyhtmbox. Sweet! I poke
around a bit and see if Rhythmbox can copy iPod music to the CPU, but
doesn't seem to do that.
- Close Rhythmbox, open Gtkpod. Click on "Read" (To read the iTunes
library database). This is where all the problems begin. I get a warning
message:

"Could not open "iTunesDB.ext" for reading extended info. Extended info
will not be used".

At this point Gtkpod hangs indefinitely. I can force the windows close,
but Gtkpod is still running (as shown by ps on the terminal). I can't
kill it, even with sudo kill -9 and worse still I can't umount the iPod
(even with sudo umount -f). Bummer. The only way out of this is to
unplug the iPod (even though it say "Do not Disconnect") and then Gtkpod
finally exits.

So, I go back and forth a few times and get the same results, and
eventually I figure out that when Gtkpod is hanging, if I unplug the
iPod without killing Gtkpod first, Gtkpod comes back to life and
actually shows me the contents of my iPod. It reads the db sucesfully
after all. Ok, so I plug the iPod back in, and try to export a track
from the iPod to the computer: Works fine! I do the happy dance and
quickly select all tunes and export from the iPod! After a few songs,
Gtkpod hangs again. I only sucessfully copied the first album, but hangs
on the first song on the second. Same as before, I can't kill Gtkpod
until I unplug the iPod.

I did a few more trials and my current thinking is that Gtkpod is
finding something in my iPod that it doesn't like. In my iPod I have a
mix of mp3s, aac/m4a files (iTunes format) and protected aac / m4p
format files (bought from iTunes). Maybe Gtkpod is crashing on those,
don't know. At some point I did install gstreamer0.8-faad to add aac
support, but that didn't help any.

I appreciate anybody's thought on this. I haven't been able to google
anyone having this same problem, and I tried Gtkpod bug system and
launchpad without success.

If anybody knows of another way to get my iPod music to my Ubuntu box,
please let me know. If possible, I want the music to be organized in
directories by Artist and then Album.

-- 
Ylan

"The universe is not required to be in
perfect harmony with human ambition"
~ Carl Sagan