I need some help… One of the gifts I received for Sparkle Season was an iPod Touch (2nd Gen). This thing is an awesome little device, but so closely tied to iTunes it makes me sick. You can’t even turn it on for the first time without syncing it to iTunes! As far as I know, the only way to get music on a 2nd generation iPod Touch is via iTunes.

So I pulled out my old Mac, installed the latest Tunes, made my music folder a samba share (read only) on my Linux box, and pointed the Mac’s iTunes library to it. Seems to work okay, except that iTunes doesn’t recognize some of the ID3 tags for a large portion of files… This is extremely frustrating and I can’t seem to correct it.

All of MP3s are tagged with ID3v2.4 tags only. I stripped any other tag format (ID3v2.3, ID3v1, and even some APE tags!) using a variety of tools: eyeD3, Mp3tag (using wine) and EasyTag. Everything else I open the files in shows the tags correctly: Amarok, EasyTag, Mp3tag, SqueezeCenter, etc… Not iTunes…

I refuse to give iTunes write permission to my MP3 collection. It’s shared with Amarok and a SqueezeBox. I’ve already spent too much time mucking around with tags to get them to be consistent between those two.

Anyone have any idea why iTunes won’t recognize the tags? Or is there better way to get music from my Linux machine into iTunes so I can sync it with my iPod Touch?