Using the iPod shuffle (v2) with Linux

The iPod shuffle (v2).

The gift

I received an iPod shuffle for my birthday this year. This is a nice piece of hardware. Its main characteristics that make it attractive are its very small size and weight, and its ability to play AAC (LP), which sounds way better than mp3.

You can have more information including full specs in apple's website there.

The penguin

All my computers at home run debian Linux, from my old indigo2 to the pc I am using to write this site. I immediately started to look for informations about using the iPod shuffle with Linux.

After some surfing, it was clear I needed a solution tailored to my precise needs: complete automation. This is how I started writing pieces of scripts for all tasks like encoding to aac, chosing music files randomly, etc... After a while it became an evidence I had to gather all pieces into a single tool. This is how fysh was born.

The script: fysh

fysh is a small perl script I wrote to handle all the tasks associated with my iPod shuffle. It does now have its page on its own there.