In previous posts, we discussed the ipod, and decided to replicate the functions of iTunes in Linux. We then started by looking at how to extract songs from CDs. Next we need to set up our audio library.

Setting up the audio library

The program I have chosen to use is gtkpod. I got it from my distro (Gentoo) by using emerge gtkpod. On Debian and Ubuntu, you can type apt-get install gtkpod. As far as I remember, on Fedora and friends you can do something like yum install gtkpod.

The following screenshot is my gtkpod in action, you can click on it to enlarge it a bit, or use this if you want a full-screen image.

All you need to do here is put any existing songs and audio files into categories. So when you 'juice' songs from a CD you can just save it to the relevant place to make it easy for you to add them to your library.

The only button I really needed was the Add Dirs button, as pictured below, I just selected my music diectory and it went through it recursively and added all my songs.

Playing songs from the library using just the computer

So as well as using the ipod, we need to be able to use gtkpod with our normal desktop audio player to act as our overall library as iTunes does on OS X. Fortunately, this seems to 'just work' out of the box, at least for me.

I am an XMMS user and that is set as my default audio player, so when I right-click a song or a set of songs and choose 'Play Now', it opens the song in XMMS.