Imagine using your iPod and a regular old microphone to record studio-quality audio. Or sitting on a commuter train and playing Othello, Pong, Tetris, or Asteroids. All this and more is possible when you install Linux on your third-generation or earlier iPod. Best of all, one soft reset, and you’re back in Apple’s iPod operating system, listening to your tunes.
The Linux iPod
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I _so_ much need iPod for the recording task
I heard about ipod and linux about a half year ago ;/.
The only problem is the courage to mess up for good with my iPod, but doesn’t seem very likely..the ability to switch back and forth from “normal” iPod to Linux is great!!!!
Hey, stop dreaming
It need good converter, good signal and so on
And a good phantom alim (+48v) for the micro…
Stop exagerating
nice to see how they’re getting on. i hope that soon there won’t be a need to switch back to the proprietary os to play my tunes
(and if i’m lucky i’ll be able to do some little coding on it -> got to port GCC :o) )
am i the only person left that sees an ipod as a waste of money, and wants nothing to do with them???
this is neet but come on, a 200$ proprietery music player. what are you guys thinking.
cool
this is neet but come on, a 200$ proprietery music player. what are you guys thinking.
What are exactly the parameters you select to set a music player as proprietary or non-proprietary? Which models/brands you’d put in the second category?
“Proprietery (sic)”? I think your dictionary is broken and not just because you mis-spelled proprietary.
I love my iPod. It plays all of my Mp3s without any hassles. OK, it doesn’t play OGG/Vorbis, but you can’t have everything. iPod does what it does, with no fanfare and and no fluting about.
Does anyone make an OggPod?
What’s with all this whining about the iPod being “proprietary” or “not letting me play my music” lately? I don’t have a clue how someone who knows the tiniest scraps of information about the MP3 player market could get caught up in this FUD.
The only proprietary thing about an iPod is that it can play AAC files and that it’s a closed box. But every MP3 player is a closed box, and every major MP3 player on the market either supports Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media format or Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format, so I fail to see what makes the iPod so unusual in this regard.
I hear some whining about the iTunes music store only selling music in AAC format, but I have no clue what this has to do with iPods. If you don’t like AAC, find another music store. But huff and puff and act like an iPod will only play music from iTMS. Here on Planet Earth, I didn’t have to convert one of my MP3s to AAC before I put them all on my iPod.
oggpod: that’d be an iriver ihp player… the rockbox firmware now runs on the 1×0 series players giving mp3, ac3, ogg, wav, and flac playback atm, the original firmware plays ogg, asf, wav, mp3, wma. .mid and .mod are being worked on atm.
http://www.ipodlinux.org/blog/index.php?p=18
give me a good reason to buy an ipod over a current cheep MP3 player. considering theres no way i would ever use itunes or that stuff.
the integration of iTunes with the iPod is its main selling point. They come together, they are one. I hate “Sonic Stage”, so the walkman was out, so i bought an iPod. Once the new itunes comes out with the integrated podcasting feature the package will be complete as far as my usage goes.
For what do such applications need multitasking, or a proper file system, or memory management? I would have expected a specialized mini-OS consisting of little more than drivers for the iPod. The only thing that comes to my mind is that for Linux experts, this way might be the easier one.
Nice idea anyways.
Hm, maybe with Linux on it this damn iPod thing will let me hear OggVorbis files in the near future =)
This isnt a bash against Linux, but am I the only one that sees this as pointless? Even if it were Windows or Mac OS that someone was trying to put on an iPod, I still think there are better things that could be done… Oh well, to each their own.
I don’t doubt this is a very interesting project in terms of geekiness. Truth is, it’s pretty much useless right now. Even playing an mp3 on it is a struggle. I will say that there is little risk to your iPod though, so feel free to try it out and prove me wrong. I’m just saying don’t get your hopes up.
“This isnt a bash against Linux, but am I the only one that sees this as pointless? Even if it were Windows or Mac OS that someone was trying to put on an iPod, I still think there are better things that could be done… Oh well, to each their own.”
There would be no point to putting OSX or Windows on an iPod; because the source code is not publically available, neither can be tuned down to the point that they can do anything useful.
With Linux, that is not the case. Any app that runs on Linux could potentially run on an iPod. The ability to hook up 2 iPods and sync them — without any other devices in the loop — seems to be an interesting hack. Also, making high quality recordings is a big deal. Turning it into a game boy seems like a good idea…though potentially legally questionable in most cases.
Most of the other apps currently ported don’t seem to be interestng to me…though, like you said, to each their own.
“If you try to play music with your Linux Pod, you’ll quickly notice that your songs don’t sound very good. In fact, they probably skip. If you try to play a song and then play Tetris while listening to it, the song stops.”
Is this true? What songs? Mp3s? AACs?
Dunno how good the D/A-converter is in the iPod, but quality of mic-recording largely depends on quality of mic-preamps. I doubt that some built-in preamp in the iPod will provide “professional” quality recordings, but if you had some good portable preamps it could in fact sound real good. It’d be a quite good cheap-ass portable recorder.
give me a good reason to buy an ipod over a current cheep MP3 player. considering theres no way i would ever use itunes or that stuff
Well, I don’t see a reason anyone could give you to buy _any_ mp3 player, it’s up to you to buy or not buy whatever you like…
Personally I bought the iPod because it is a very nice piece of hardware, and it looks great. The only thing I don’t like is the battery life.
And BTW I never used iTunes, it’s not necessary. I just ripped and downloaded my own stuff.
Rio Karma plays OGG and FLAC and even comes with ethernet.
Is this true? What songs? Mp3s? AACs?
All songs. The issues arise from the fact that resources in the iPod are pretty slim. The system was designed to have a HUGE amount of storage, with only enough horsepower to play an MP3/AAC stream with the aid of DSP hardware. For those unfamiliar, that’s not very much processing “oomph” at all. The system wasn’t designed to multitask a game of tetris with a music stream…it was designed to play music, and occasionally navigate menus. You work with what you have, and all things considered linux on the ipod project has done a pretty brilliant job.
“mum mum look!!! i can cycle without hands…”
Funny and nice. But you should talk about guys working on Pokemon Mini too then. They’re doing a great work too
http://www.edirol.com/products/info/r4.html
And there are others that are similar.
iPod is trendy, but it is inherently mediocre at best. and the trendiness means you are paying for a brand name, not audio quality.
And once you’ve recorded onto your iPod running linux, you can use one of the several professional-grade, open source multitrack audio sequencers to turn your tunes into a chart topping GPL anthem.
Make it so. You’ve got the great idea. You’ve got the huge array of great open source music tools. All you need is some words. But scour the Creative Commons and you’ll be set.
Please post it on BitTorrent when you’re done.
So when are we going to be able to run iTunes on Linux? When are we going to be able to run any of that fancy pop software on Linux: Answer is never. The big companies don’t want to see it happen. They’re more afraid of Linux desktop than MS desktop.IBM could port Notes and Lotus Office to Linux overnight. Why not? Fear. Adobe could also port all their software in a short time frame. Not gonna happen. We have the same reader we had 5 years ago. Real Player has ported their player to Linux. Thanks for the buggy garbage. MS zealots like to blame X-windows as a piece of crap. Well it’s not bad, but Apple wrote their desktop GUI (whatever it’s called today) in a few years. X is still chugging in the basement after 15 years. The selection of open source software available for Linux is pretty good, but it’ll never cut it for Joe user’s desktop as long as big companies never port their software to Linux. Thanks for the rant opportunity.