Amarok's rewritten iPod plugin: testers needed!

Matěj Laitl · April 15, 2012 · 1 min read

Little introduction first: I'm a student of theoretical computer science from Prague/Czech Republic and I've started contributing to Amarok last autumn by fixing some of its (mainly iPod-related) bugs.

It turned out that maintaining the iPod collection plug-in was rather painful due to its complexity that accumulated over time - and I got motivated to rewrite it from scratch by Amarok's Bart Cerneels. The effort is now over. Welcome the all-new iPod collection plug-in! (supports iPads and iPhones, too!)

Mandatory screen-shot of the rewritten iPod collection plug-in

What does the rewrite bring? Well, working playlists, transcoding, multiple concurrent transfers, working stale & orphaned tracks detection and elimination plus many more enhancements and bug-fixes. Thanks to the rewrite, some bugs in USB Mass Storage collection got fixed, too.

You'll get all these goodies with Amarok 2.6, which is slated for release in a month or (rather) two. But if you're brave enough, I encourage you to compile Amarok from source using Mamarok's awesome guide and try it now! Please report any bugs you find to KDE bugzilla and if it works, send me a screen-shot of the iPod Device Configuration dialog so that I know how it looks with models I don't have.

iPod collection plug-in is only tested on Linux and won't probably work out-of-the box on other platforms. There is a hope for Windows users, there seems to be an older version of the needed libgpod library in KDE on Windows repositories. It should be possible to port the newest version, 0.8.2, too. Have fun!