After playing Rock Band this weekend, I’ve been wanting to update my iPod with some new music. I was thinking of installing iTunes onto my desktop, but as it’s a Windows machine it’s having issues and generally pissing me off. Not to say that I probably don’t deserve it, and it is partially my fault — but I like blaming Windows. So the win machine being out of the question, I started to investigate iPod sync software for Linux. This is where I discovered GTKPod. I installed it, plugged in my iPod nano and away we went. The software isn’t 100% user intuitive, but I figured it out fairly quickly. It’s not “iTunes easy”, but good enough for me.
During this process I also went on Amazon and bought some new music to put onto said iPod. I do like Amazon’s MP3 store. Previously I’ve got their downloader tool working under Linux — but for some reason this time around it didn’t. Regardless, I clicked the “skip install” button (which switched you over to HTTP downloads) and off I went. Amazon never asked again — it just went to straight HTTP download (and after telling Firefox to always save it — it was cake). I did somehow manage to buy 2 songs, twice… not sure how I managed that (and paid for them twice) — but I’ve already put in a request to customer service for a refund. I’m sure it’ll be fine.
This is where I found a strange and scary feature of the Ubuntu File Browser. If you mouse and hold over an MP3 — it will automatically start playing it. This is a really nifty feature if you know about it and want a preview. But when you discover this feature at 2300 at night, you forgot that you’ve left your surround sound system on fairly loud — and you mouse over….. SHIT it scared the crap out of me. I yanked the sound cable out of my laptop sooooo fast. Of course the music promptly stopped playing because I nudged my mouse off the icon (of course the song I happened to settle on by mistake was techno that started out strong).
Again, nifty feature — but I would have love to have read about it before I discovered it by mistake and scared the daylights out of myself.