The great guys at BeInSync got me an iPod-Shuffle yesterday.
The moment I started skimming through the manual I figured this a’int gonna be an easy match up. Apple seems to really want you to install iTunes, maybe it’s an attitude problem. I personaly dislike having to install software that I don’t need.
Why can we simply not use iTunes ? Because Apple intermixed iTunes and the Shuffle just to damn nicely together (Read more here)
Martin Fiedler wrote a great tool that takes iTunes out of the equation. It path.os.walk()’s your iPod and builds a file with all the MP3s you’ve got there, so that the iPod knows what to play. You need to run it whenever you finish adding/removing mp3′s from your iPod, but heck it’s better than doing it all through iTunes.
There were two things I missed in Martin’s program:
- It has to sit in the root of the iPod’s directory-structure.
Added a command-line argument ‘-r’ or ‘–root’. If you choose to put the program in ‘/programs/builder_db’ it will simply change to ‘/’ before starting to run, which now means you can put it wherever you want - There wasn’t an EXE version (it’s written in Python, what if I got to a friend and he doesn’t have Python installed ?)
This was simple, we just use py2exe to make ourselves an executable version.
This now allows me to have the following directory structure on my Shuffle:
- \Music – this is where I put all my music/podcasted-stuff.
- \rebuild_db – the executable version of rebuild_db together with it’s DLLs.
-
rebuild_db.bat – this one sits in the root of the iPod and simply contains: rebuild_db\rebuild_db.exe –root –nolog
Here’s the executable program: rebuild_db.zip (1.1MB)
Here’s the modified Source: rebuild_db-0.6-pre2.zip