iPod Touch - I succumbed to temptation

Yesterday I succumbed to temptation and bought a 32Gb iPod Touch to replace my venerable 2Gb iPod Nano. I realised before this purchase that my limited Windows resource would be a challenge: my library of music files is held on a fileserver running Ubuntu 8.10, and my sole XP machine is a small partition on an IBM laptop (I had decided I'd rather not fanny around jailbreaking the iPod, unless absoutely necessary).  Still, there was enough disk space to get iTunes installed and to sync some music to the iPod.

The iPod is everything I'd expected, a terrific UI, effective touch screen, easy to set up wireless comms.  But oh dear, it does show the fingerprints!

Having negotiated the execrable iTunes software, I've been investigating how to best access my music library.   FTP transfer between the Ubuntu server and the XP laptop is pretty quick, but doesn't address the disk space issue.  I found it pretty trivial to set up a samba share that could be seen by the XP laptop, and indeed by iTunes.  Unfortunately it seems impossible to directly sync music from th samba share to the iPod via iTunes.

A quick Google search pointed me to using Firefly to stream music to iTunes.  This was again pretty trivial to set up, although it still seems impossible to get music files onto the iPod by that route.  If any reader has advice on this, please do leave a comment.

My final approach is to use an external USB hard drive (and copy the music files).  This would have been my first choice, but the drive is at work - hopefully I'll retrieve it today and have a go this afternoon.  One bonus is that it represents a backup of the files.

Failing that, I may have to remove the Ubuntu partition on the XP laptop, and reformat it so that XP can see it.  Rats!!!!