The following guide allows you to wirelessly sync an iPhone with Amarok in Ubuntu 7.10, including:

• adding, editing and playing songs to the iPhone
• creating and copying playlists to the iPhone
• copy songs from iPhone to the Amarok library

It takes less than 10 minutes, and is completely graphical.

Updated: no need for Terminal commands anymore as ipod-convenience will create the necessary symlinks.

Per a lot of my other writing, I’ve added it to the Ubuntu wiki. The guide below is just for iPhone users running Amarok, iPhone Touch and gtkpod users should visit help.ubuntu.com.

Naturally, it requires a jailbroken iPhone.

Set up the iPhone

On your iPhone:

1. Click Settings → General and set Auto-lock to Never. This will ensure the iPhone keeps the WiFi connection open.
2. Click Settings → WiFi and select your WiFi network. Click the Static button and change the IP Address to something outside the dynamically assigned range of your network. For example, if your wireless router normally assigns 192.168.1.1 - 192.168.1.5, try 192.168.1.10. This will ensure your iPhone is always contactable at the same address for syncing.
3. Open Installer.
4. Click All Packages → BSD Subsystem → Install
5. Click on All Packages → OpenSSH → Install.
6. Click on All Packages → JohnTool → Install.

Set up Ubuntu

In Ubuntu:

A third party source provides the ipod convenience package needed to properly mount and unmount an iPhone or iPod Touch, and for gtkpod users, a newer gtkpod that’s required for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

1. Click System → Administration → Synaptic Package Manager

Once Syanptic starts, click Settings → Repositories → Third Party Software. Click Add and use deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ipod-touch/ubuntu gutsy main as the APT line.

1. Click Reload
2. Install the ipod-convenienceand amarok packages. When asked, enter the IP address of your iPod Touch or iPhone that you selected earlier. When asked for a folder to mount your iPod Touch or iPhone, either leave the default of /media/ipod or another folder if you prefer - just remember to use that folder name for rest of this guide. The package will make the folder for you.

Set up Amarok

1. Click Applications → Sound and Video → Amarok

When you first open up Amarok:

1. Click Settings → Configure Amarok.
2. Choose Media Devices.
3. Hit Add Device.
4. Select Apple iPod Media Device for the plugin type.
5. Point it at your mount point, /media/ipod.
6. Back in the main app, click the blue cog icon called Configure Device just above the iPhone or iPod Touch. For Pre-Connect Command, add iphone-mount, for the Post-Disconnect Command, add iphone-umount

That’s all the setup work. From now on, when  you need to sync to your iPhone, just

• Run JohnTool on ypour iPhone. This will keep the network connection open while you sync.
• Click Devices → Connect in Amarok. After entering your iPhone password the iPhone will appear in Amarok.

You can now add, edit, and delete music to the iPhone like any other device. Just drag the music files into Amarok, and hit Transfer to move them to your iPhone. When you’re done, stop any music playing from the iPhone and click Disconnect.

Easy as pie.

Update: If music doesn’t show up immediately: this may be due to a bug recent BSD Subsystem packages missing the killall command. If so, download killall for iPhone, move the ‘killall’ file to /usr/bin/on your iPhone, and enable the execute permission.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Apple, Desktop Linux, Linux, Ubuntu, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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