How do you use gtkpod

At a minimum, you'll probably want to create a playlist for each album that you add to your iPod, so that you can recreate the experience of hearing the tracks in the order that the artist intended.

The gtkpod application makes it easy to create many different types of playlists. There are also various ways of creating playlists, but you can access all of them from the Edit O Create Playlists menu, shown in Figure For example, to create a playlist that contains all of the tracks associated with a certain album, navigate to that album in gtkpod and select all of the tracks that it contains. This displays a dialog that enables you to specify a meaningful name for the new playlist the default value is the catchy name "New Playlist," which isn't all that memorable.

After entering a new name, click OK to save your playlist under its new name. As you can see from Figure , gtkpod supports a wide variety of playlists. Once you've created a new playlist, its name is displayed in the leftmost pane in the main gtkpod dialog. You may need to click on the entry for your iPod in order to see the playlists that it contains. You can then select any playlist to show the sequence of tracks that it contains, as shown in Figure , which displays my newly created playlist for the ancient Steve Miller Band album, Number 5.

More often, you'll simply want to modify an existing playlist. To remove tracks from a selected playlist or otherwise manipulate the files that one contains, right-click on any entry in the playlist to display a context-sensitive menu.

To remove a track from the playlist without removing the associated audio file from your iPod, select the Delete From Playlist command. To remove the selected track from both the playlist and the iPod, select the Delete From iPod command. You can manipulate existing playlists several other ways. For example, you can re-sort the playlist in different ways by clicking on any of the headings shown in the track-listing pane at the bottom of the gtkpod application.

You can add other tracks to an existing playlist by navigating to those tracks and dragging them from the track-listing pane to the name of the playlist in the left pane. The gtkpod application provides a tremendous amount of control over playlists, making it easy for you to create playlists that enable you to hear what you want, when you want, in the order that you want. Once you've finished adding music to your iPod, creating and editing playlists, and so on, you will certainly want to save all of those changes to your iPod.

Although files and directories of audio files, new playlists, and other new items are added to your iPod at the time that you create them, the database that your iPod uses to track these new and modified items isn't updated until you explicitly synchronize the information in gtkpod with those databases on your iPod. You should always synchronize gtkpod with your iPod after making any changes to ensure that those changes are not lost or saved in some incomplete, intermediate state.

After all, updating playlists or adding new music to your iPod doesn't do you much good if you can't access the new information! To synchronize this information, click the Save Changes button in the gtkpod toolbar. A dialog displays as the information is synchronized. Once this dialog closes, it is safe to disconnect your iPod from your Ubuntu system, as described in the next section.

Simply writing your changes to your iPod and exiting from gtkpod doesn't disconnect your iPod from your Ubuntu Linux system. Like any storage device on a Linux system, an iPod is mounted as part of your Linux filesystem so that you can access it as part of the standard directory hierarchy.

Although it is mounted as a part of your system's filesystem, an iPod's screen will display an international No symbol and a "Do not disconnect! To safely disconnect an iPod from the filesystem after using gtkpod, you must first unmount it to guarantee that all disk updates have been saved and that the iPod's filesystem is marked as up to date and clean.

Right-click on the iPod icon on your desktop and select Properties :. Now we must configure gtkpod so that it knows where our iPod got mounted and what iPod model we use. This configuration has to be done only once - gtkpod remembers these settings for the future. A new window named Create Repository comes up. First we tell gtkpod where our iPod got mounted, so we click on the Browse button right to iPod mountpoint :. A new window opens where you can browse your filesystem.

Next we select our iPod model in the drop-down menu right to Model. I have a fifth generation iPod nano 2GB, black :. Finally, give your repository a unique name in the Repository name field, then click on OK to leave the Create Repository window:. Click on OK again to leave the Repository Options window:. Found this through Thoof if you missed it, you can get this article's ThoofRank button here.

Also Dugg ;-. Banshee gets in the way of setting up gtkipod. Banshee works okay for no Apple products so far, I'm a beginner at Linux. This feature is only available to subscribers.