Sync with iTunes while in Rockbox OS?

[Warphine]

Been using Rockbox for a couple of months now and it's working great. Problem is, I prefer to sync with iTunes so that way my playlists still work but lately the original iPod Classic OS is crashing at boot causing me to not be able to use iTunes. I'm wondering if maybe my iPod library is just so big now that the original OS just can't handle it anymore?

I have a 1TB iPod Classic (7th Gen) modded with the iFlash Dual SD adapter (2x 512 GB) and I'm over 50K songs now.

Is there some way to sync with iTunes while in the Rockbox OS?

I see that when I'm in the Rockbox OS, while connected to my PC, my iPod shows up as drive J (while a second drive for I appears as a generic USB Drive). Normally, when connected to PC while in the original OS, my iPod is normally just drive I. Despite this, iTunes doesn't recognize my iPod as drive J. Is there some way to get it to treat it like it was booted into the original OS so I can sync to it?

[A11A]

You could try a different utility to manage songs like Amarok, it's possible you've reached the limit of what stock/itunes is capable of.
Besides that, you get some benefits from using a different tool like being able to re-encode tracks into vorbis or opus.

While I don't know how good Rockbox's opus implementation is other than knowing it works, opus should theoretically use the least processing power to decode of any of the supported lossy formats, which should translate to the best battery life. If any core devs know about how well libopus is implemented it would be good to know if this holds up.

Regarding iTunes: Does disk mode work? I can't remember if they removed disk mode from later iPod classics or not.

[Warphine]

Regarding iTunes: Does disk mode work? I can't remember if they removed disk mode from later iPod classics or not.

This was pretty damn genius! Forgot all about disc mode. Thank you!

Unfortunately, I have it in disc mode right now, and the PC shows it's connected/accessible but I haven't been able to get iTunes to recognize it yet.

[Warphine]

Anybody know any secrets for getting iTunes to recognize an iPod in disc mode? I've tried just about everything I was able to search online for relating to this (uninstalling the ipod device using device manager, etc).

If this would work, it would solve all my problems with this setup. Otherwise, I'm going to need to nix iTunes and roll with files directly copied to rockbox, but will not have playlist support anymore (which is primarily how I use this thing). TIA!

[Frankenpod]

You can copy music files directly to the ipod, and export playlists from iTunes, just as long as you retain the same folder structure for the files on the ipod that you have on the computer.  Might need to find some suitable script for iTunes for exporting the playlists, I can't remember if plain vanilla iTunes exports playlists in the right way, but I just export playlists from media monkey (using some MM script for playlist exporting, with various parameters set appropriately to make it work) and copy them to the ipod.
And it's not a good idea to write to the ipod when it's in rockbox mode, see umpteen threads about the issues with rockbox writing to flash mods, stick with OF diskmode.

[Warphine]

iTunes won't recognize the iPod anymore. I put it in Disc Mode hoping that it would but it won't. My iPod has too much music to even boot in the original iPod OS so I can't use that either.

This was working great with iTunes for a few months with Rockbox, but then I added 2 gigs of music to my iPod and pushed it over the edge to where the original iPod OS just crashes at boot. So I started this thread and someone said that you can boot in Disc Mode which seemed like a great idea except iTunes won't recognize the iPod in that mode even though it shows up as a drive in Windows Explorer.

[Frankenpod]

Yes, I got that.  I'm saying you don't need to sync with iTunes.  Just export the playlists then copy them to the ipod with drag-and-drop, along with the music files.  (Of course, IIRC, iTunes only lets you export playlists one-at-a-time, which is a PITA if you have a huge number of them, but I think there are scripts that can get round that)

You don't need iTunes to recognize the ipod, iTunes doesn't need to do anything to the ipod.


Having too much music won't stop an iPod from booting in disk mode and dragging-and-dropping files to it, unless you have a hardware fault or corruption issue.  It will only stop you from seeing and playing that music if you boot in OF.  If your ipod won't boot in disk mode then there's another problem, not to do with having too much music.

Basically, give up on Itunes for everything except music management on the computer.  Only use drag-and-drop for syncing, and only do that in disk mode.

[Warphine]

Sorry for the misunderstanding then.

I knew I could nix iTunes completely and roll with a drag and drop solution, but I figured all my playlists were tied to the four letter codes that iTunes assigns the mp3s when it syncs with the iPod. But I suppose the playlists are actually created manually/automatically from the raw mp3 files on my hard drive so if you export them from iTunes they should work without the four letter codes.

[Warphine]

Looks like when I export the playlist it uses absolute paths instead of relative, so they show up like:

F:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\<TrackNumber> - <SongName>.mp3

My iPod is drive letter I. Will Rockbox ignore the drive letter part of the playlist as long as I keep the folder structure the same it'll still work?

i.e. I:\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\

[Frankenpod]

I assume you know that to use drag-and-drop you do need to remove everything previously synced by iTunes with its 4-letter file names and copy the entire library with drag-and-drop?

I don't know about iTunes, but in MM when I export the playlist I have a huge list of options as to how to format it, including the option of whether to use absolute paths or relative ones.  With iTunes it's possible you need a separate script to give you those options.  I believe there are lots of different scripts out there for doing things with iTunes.  Otherwise you might have to fix them in a script editor, I dunno, as I say, I don't use iTunes any more.

[Warphine]

Yeah, I know that, thanks. My computer spent all day yesterday (about 18 hours) copying all my files to the hard drive in a drag-and-drop manner so I'm already on my way to having this thing up and running again.

That's awesome about MM. Sounds like I might need to look into switching over to that. I used to use it waaaay back in the day.

You are always very helpful. Thank you for your time.

[Warphine]

Good news! The playlists exported from iTunes using the iTunes GUI work on Rockbox as is, even with the absolute path.

[Frankenpod]

Yeah, I know that, thanks. My computer spent all day yesterday (about 18 hours) copying all my files to the hard drive in a drag-and-drop manner so I'm already on my way to having this thing up and running again.

That's awesome about MM. Sounds like I might need to look into switching over to that. I used to use it waaaay back in the day.

You are always very helpful. Thank you for your time.

Yeah, it takes **&&*!!! ages to copy a full library across.  Not far off 24 hours.  If only they'd invented USB3 much earlier.

If you aren't doing so already, and assuming you use a windows PC, I suggest using a robocopy script for copying/updating music on the ipod.

I feel like I might as well have stuck with iTunes.  I switched to MM because (a) iTunes had so many annoying bugs, and (b) it would only sync in that stupid iTunes style.  But then MM turned out to have just as many bugs, and I switched to using robocopy anyway, so there really wasn't much point.

[Warphine]

I normally use a free program called "Karen's Replicator" for keeping an exact copy of certain important folders/files on multiple hard drives.

Now that I'm using drag-and-drop, it was only natural for me to add a few jobs to this program to run on schedule to copy music, playlist, and database files to my iPod automatically.

If only I could write a script to automate these processes I'd be set!
- Run "Copy Music to iPod" job using Karen's Replicator
- Export Playlists from iTunes to a folder
- Run "Copy Playlists to iPod" job using Karen's Replicator
- Run "Update Now" database option within Rockbox GUI on PC.
- Close and Reboot Rockbox GUI on PC to Finish Database Setup.
- Run "Copy Rockbox Files to iPod" job using Karen's Replicator