ipod doesn't play songs - using gtkpod

English Multimedia
1

Hi, I am trying to get an ipod working with opensuse 11, but am having no luck getting songs to play on it. It is an 80gb classic, don’t know much more than that (it’s not mine), but was bought new pretty recently so it is a late generation one.

Anyway, the problem is when I transfer songs using gtkpod or amarok (haven’t tried banshee yet) and disconnect the ipod, I can then find the songs on the ipod but it will not play. When you select a track or an album it just sits there at 0:00, and after a while jumps to the next song and does the same (and yes I checked, it is definitely not on ‘pause’).

Anyway I don’t know whether this is a faulty ipod and I should take it back, or whether for some reason the songs are not being transferred properly. When I open the ipod’s file system through nautilus I can find all the music files, and even play them straight off the device while in amarok, but it will not play from the ipod itself.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? I don’t know much about ipods, just trying to get this working for someone else. I thought that ipods only played .m4a files or something (apple file types), whereas gtkpod and amarok appear to be transferring mp3’s directly. Is this ok or should they be converted first?

2

Kind of a very belated reply, but I had the same problem with my iPod Classic today.
It’s probably just a hang-up of the firmware: I can’t reconstruct whether it was caused by gtkpod, Linux mounting or even the Apple Remote ;-). The iPod was synchronised with gtkpod and performed faultlessly before.
Anyway, all I had to do was to reset the iPod by holding down both centre and menu button until the Apple logo appeared. All music data was preserved and playable Apparently a device reset from iTunes deletes everything, however, I didn’t test it.

Oh yes, and iPods play mp3s, they just use a special kind of internal library. Conversion is done automatically by gtkpod during transfer.