Gtkpod Hangs

[Ylan Segal]

Ylan Segal wrote:
> 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.
> 

Follow up:

I realized that there is a gtkpod with aac support in the repositories,
and installed that (gtkpod-aac) instead of the regular gtkpod, since my
suspicion was that gtkpod was having problems with aac files.

After installing, I deleted ~/.gtkpod and started fresh: Results where
exactly the same as described above in the original post.

Help to get this working or a workaround is much appreciated!

-- 
Ylan

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