Adventures with my old iPod Touch

The iPod Touch (4th Gen) in the car could no longer be detected, so we pulled it out of the console to find it in DFU mode.  Yikes.

I had extremely little hope, but I took it and its USB-A to 30-pin dock cable (the only extant cable of this type in my collection) inside, plugged it into a USB-C to USB-A adapter, and plugged it into the Mac.  It… er… worked. Sure, it appeared to open in Finder and not iTunes (rip), but it actually worked (on the second try; the advice for “unknown error 9” is to try again.  What are we doing as a profession.)  I was able to restore iOS 6.1.6 to it, although I did not have the option to keep my data.

But, I never moved my music onto the Mac.  I figured, with a hardware device that is fifteen years old, and back in factory state, surely, Linux should be able to sync to it?

The first problem was even getting it connected, because Amarok threw an error from ifuse.  Copying the command out of the error message and running it in a terminal worked totally fine.  (I didn’t think of this at the time, but… Amarok logs in the systemd journal.  Maybe its permissions have been stripped down too far.)

Once that was up and running, I restarted Amarok a couple of times, before I found out where it had hidden the iPod.  It’s under “Local Collection.”

I then waited a long time for things to sync.  I waited so long that I wandered off and forgot to set “Don’t Sleep”, so the computer suspended.  The iPod made its ancient, discordant glissando when the computer woke up, and then Amarok—and any process trying to stat() the ifuse mount point—froze.  ifuse sat there burning 100% CPU for a couple of minutes, and then I restarted.

(Apparently the sleep interval was fifteen minutes, the longest time that doesn’t make KDE System Settings complain about ’using more energy.'  Well… I paid for it, one way or the other.)

I got it going again.  Amarok carefully loaded gigabytes of tracks onto the iPod Touch, then started complaining about checksum errors for the database.  That’s the part that makes them useful, instead of having the iPod show “No content” and a button for the iTunes Store.  That ended up being the final boss that I couldn’t beat.  The tracks are still there, apparently, showing up as “Other” data on the Mac.

Yeah.

I plugged the backup drive into the Mac, imported everything, and exported it to the iPod Touch.  The double copy was orders of magnitude faster than Amarok’s unidirectional efforts.  I should never have been so lazy.

• Free Software: 0
• Proprietary OS: 2

I don’t know how we got here.