Backed an ipod up with dd, how to retrieve all tracks in one go with gnupod?

Question

I have had gnupod for a while. Still haven't figured out how to use it though. I usually just go for gtkpod. So this question, in case anyone had any doubts after reading everything below, is purely about gnupod syntax.

Recently I decided to get my ipod replaced under this replacement scheme. (I don't like proprietary hardware, etc., but if someone is going to give me a brand new piece of hardware... for something that was originally a gift... hmm...)

Anyway, long story short, I backed up my old ipod using dd:

dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=ipodbk

and just tried running gtkpod (with ipodbk mounted as -t vfat -o loop) to see if it would pick it up, like it does when an ipod is attached, which it does.

But this question is not about that.

I don't want to waste time with gtkpod's bugginess when it comes to exporting an entire ipod's files (tried it before. ended up with a lot of 0 byte files... no thanks).

I just want to be able to export all the tracks from the disk image in one go.

The command probably looks something like

gnupod_something (some switches) -m /home/user/ipodbkmount/ (some stuff?)

and the output probably looks something like

(window flooded with 1000 lines of text)

but I've never really been able to get gnupod to work. I'm sure it's a great program, and I have to usually invoke it as gnupod_check -m ipod --fixit once in a while when gtkpod loses track of what it's doing and makes errors when it writes files to the device. As for gnupod, I'm just not intelligent enough to figure out its syntax on the more routine ipod manipulations, I think.

So, yeah, what's that command?

Answer 1

First, gnupod does not work directly with the iPod database, you need to convert from and to the gnupod database, so you want to run tunes2pod.pl first. This only needs to be done when you change the iTunesDB (iPod's own database) directly — if you use gnupod again without using other tool, you don't need to run this again.

(Likewise, if you use gnupod to change the database, you need to run mktunes.pl, which updates the iTunesDB.)

When you already have the gnupod format database (which is stored in the iPod just like the iTunesDB):

If what you want is to get the track information, no files, you want to use gnupod_search.pl (the gnupod tool to search the db and edit entries).

Have a look at the manpage, because you can tune what it shows, including the path to the files themselves (but from your comments it seems you don't need this).

IIRC, running it with no arguments (other than the mountpoint and related iPod configuration stuff) dumps the whole list of entries.

If you want to search, there are several arguments that go like --title=the-string, --artist=the-string. title and artist are "keys", and you can use --rename="key=value" to change the value associated to that key in the matched entries. There's also --delete that, well, deletes whatever matches the search parameters.

Oh, and, for a quick introduction to an iPod manager, what else... oh, right, add songs: gnupod_addsong.pl, it takes the names of the media files and copies these to the iPod. Has several options (e.g. to override the title) and, if you have the required dependencies, it may even be able to convert other formats such as ogg (although you probably need to specify --decode=format, where the format can be, among others, mp3).

(If you end up using gnupod as your iPod manager, you can put the mountpoint and model information in ~/.gnupodrc to save some typing.)