Adding a New Disc to Itunes via Rythmbox/Samba

Itunes is getting music via Samba from Ubuntu. If you import a new CD on the Umbuntu server, you have to import the new folder on the Samba Share under Itunes for it to appear in the library on the Samba client.

To do this select File/Add Folder to Library. Then find the network share and then the specific new folder that the CD was imported into. Yes, if you have a lot of CDs, this will be slow. It should import quickly once you find it and be immediately available under Itunes.

Samba Sharing from Ubuntu to Itunes

Ok, so I've gotten my music library onto Ubuntu and am sharing it via Samba. Now I want to remove the MP3 files from my Windows laptop and instead get at them via Samba.

My goal here is to be able to continue using Itunes on my Windows laptop to download podcasts and Itunes store purchases (i.e. the dynamic stuff) while keeping the bulk of the static MP3s on the server. And then sync my iPod from the laptop using a combination of the local and remote content. New CD's will be added by ripping them on the Ubuntu server and then being imported on the laptop (I think they will have to be manually added to the iTunes library on each laptop unfortunately).

First, I mount the Samba voume on my windows box. Then I fire up Itunes and delete all the music I copied over to Ubuntu, moving it to the recycle bin in the process. Yes, this takes a little while. (BTW, for reference I have about 8000 MP3s consuming about 40 GB and am using fairly modern machines.)

Now, I make sure that I don't copy the files from Samba to the local disk. I select Edit/Preferences and then select the Advanced tab and make sure "Copy files to iTunes folder when adding to library" is NOT selected. Then click OK.

Now I select File/Add Folder to Library. Then I find the mounted SAMBA folder and select the Music folder and hit OK.

Now go get lunch while it runs. It took roughly 30 minutes to import (after which you can start playing back music) and then another few hours to Process Album Artwork and Determine Gapless Playback Information (during which time iTunes is very sluggish but functional).

Following this I plugged in my iPod and synched. It took a while for the sync to start, I'm assuming iTunes took a while to confirm everything on the iPod matched the "new" MP3s in the iTunes library.

The one weird things I saw during synch, was that my single purchased song off of iTunes became duplicated in my library with the duplicate pointing to a missing file. I deleted this broken duplicate and all seemed well. *Shrug*

Ubuntu 6.10, Rythmbox and Sound Juicer: Enabling MP3 Ripping

First, a hint about setting up sound. This HowTo is very helpful. The only thing I had to do was double-click on the speaker icon in the upper right and then move the PCM volume up. Until I did that I got no sound output. I found putting the PCM level at about 1/3rd of max worked out about right.

This thread and this help page were useful to figuring this out. Ultimately brian g's post at the end of this thread gave me the right GStreamer encoding stream. What's below is what worked for me taken from all of those postings.

1. If you haven't already done so, make sure you have gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly installed:
   

   sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly



2. Then do the following install (Thanks to Gordon for confirming it is needed).
   

   sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

   
   
3. Open Sound Juicer.
4. Select Edit/Preferences
5. Click on Edit Profiles
6. Click on New
7. Name it "MP3"
8. Select the new profile, and click on Edit
9. Set the GStreamer Pipeline to:
   

   audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=4 vbr-quality=2 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

10. Set the File Extension to mp3
11. Make sure Active? is selected.
12. Click OK
13. Close the Audio Profiles window and the Sound Juicer preferences
14. At this point I couldn't select my newly created profile in Sound Juicer, so I had to...
    
15. Close and restart Sound Juicer.
16. Now select Edit/Preferences again.
17. For Output Format select your newly created MP3 format.
18. Close the Preferences pane.
    

Now if you Extract in Sound Juicer you should end up with MP3 files.

Note: It looks like one should be able to use Rythmbox to rip MP3 directly using its "Copy to library function" but it doesn't work for me. I select Edit/Preferences and then selecting your new MP3 format as the Preferred Format. But then when I try to Copy to library I get the following error:

Error transferring track
no element "xingmux"

Note 2: Apparently these changes will only make MP3 ripping available to the current user. This post has directions for making MP3 ripping available to all users on the system.

Ubuntu 6.10: Getting ITunes to see Rythmbox

My next step was to share music from Rythmbox to ITunes running on the Winsows XP and MacOS laptops. This turned out to be non-obvious.

First, in Rythmbox, click on Edit/Preferences then select the Sharing tab and select Share my music and give it a name of your choosing. I also required a password.

At this point I still couldn't see Rythmbox from ITunes or vice versa.

The next thing to do was to turn on the Avahi daemon. Do this by selecting System/Administration/Networking and then select the General tab and make sure the checkbox for Automatic service discovery is checked.

And then I had to do one more then, which was to enable something called D-Bus. I did this by opening a Terminal and editing /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

sudo vi /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf

And uncomment the following line:

#enable-dbus=yes

so that it looks like:

enable-dbus=yes

Then restart avahi:

sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

This lets me see Rythmbox from ITunes. I still can't see ITunes from Rythmbox. This post may give the reason why.

Getting Rythmbox to Recognize MP3s

After I copied over my Itunes library to my Ubuntu 6.10 system I was somewhat surprised to find it didn't recognize MP3s. Poking around the net a little turned up this was do to intelletual property issues and there were a number of different fixes posted (for example).

I tried various ones and here's what I think ended up working for me. I say I think because I tried a number and it started working after what I did below. It's possible some of the prior steps I took were important.

First you have to allow your system to download software from universe and mutliverse. Select System/Administration/Software Sources. Make sure "Community maintained Open Source software (universe)" and "Software restricted by copyright or legal issues (multiverse)" are checked. Then click Close.

Then I ran the following command:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

And restarted Rythmbox. After that it recognized MP3 just fine.

Note that it still doesn't seem to be able to rip CDs into MP3s. That's still on the todo list...

For the record, here are some of the other things I found on the net that I tried (after adding universe and multiverse to my software sources), which either didn't work or didn't seem to have any effect:

apt-get install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-gl gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse libxine-extracodecs w32codecs

apt-get install gstreamer0.8-mad

apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins

apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins