The Epic Fail of Music Syncing under Linux

Ouch. Ask a silly question, get a ridiculous answer.

I have, as has been noted before, a Motorola Droid X. Mostly, I use Grooveshark, Slacker, and Pandora for my music needs, but I do have 5000+ songs on a server at home. On my desktop (wherever I might be) I access those songs via Ampache, streaming as I need them.

To sync some songs with my Droid, I turned to the wonderful Media Monkey, under Windows. The Monkey is a truly awesome piece of software; the kids and I have used it forever to sync music into various MP3 players. Always works. Edits tags with ease. Displays none of iTunes despicable bloat. Doesn’t crash. Handles a network music collection with aplomb. My oldest daughter goes to sleep to a playlist in Media Monkey!

I’ve used MM for so long, on so many different little players, of course it was where I turned first for my Droid.

Trivial. Plug in with Mass Storage mode, configure the directories for Music and Playlists, boom, works.

I promptly forgot about it. I don’t sync that often. Local content is music of last resort for me.

Until this weekend, when I was recovering from my Number One Daughter’s ten-girl sleepover. Traumatic events prompt the strangest questions.

In this case I asked, “Surely I can sync my playlists and music from Linux, right?”

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Things Not To Type At The Shell Prompt

$ sudo chown -R .*

Really. Bad idea. No matter how screwed up the ownership of your .bashrc got. That command won’t help you.

The Pleasant Surprise of Lucid Lynx Beta 2

I liked Unix from the first time I saw it, in the early ’80s when I took a class in the summer at my dad’s community college.

I’ve been using Linux for a good long time — I remember when the move the 1.3 kernel was in the offing. I’ve installed it on a ton of machines over the years. I ran my own IMAP server in-house for a while, until webmail made that stupid. I’ve got multiple Linux servers in my house, and a passel of them at work.

For years I worked on Unix boxes; some of my earliest Java coding was done on a Solaris box. But Solaris, like BSD, is too niche to use as an everyday platform on commodity hardware. So, half my hard-drive is an Ubuntu installation, and that’s where I do most of my work.

How Linux (almost) Drove Me To Windows XP

Yep. Sunday afternoon, I was this close to nuking the linux partition on my laptop. Monday, a lack of blank CDROM disks saved me.

The Garage Principle

Over time, most people have come to realize that: Everything interesting in technology eventually can be built in a garage.

I call this the Garage Principle.

Links: Apple; Linux; Cathedral and the Bazaar; Verizon MiFi;