Rhythmbox vs iTunes vs last.fm

I've had an iPod Touch for some time now (it's one of the 2G versions, with 32Gb storage), and the device is exactly what I need - something to play music from, to access my email & calendar, and to run a few apps.  I don't often use it for twittering or blogging or browsing the web,  What I don't particularly like is iTunes, for which I have to boot into Windows (and it's one of the few things I would be using Windows for), it's always seemed rather clunky to use.  In fact, because until recently Windows PCs were in rather short supply in my house, I've been running iTunes on a small partition on a dual boot laptop, with the actual music files on a USB hard drive. So.  The latest version of Ubuntu (10.04) uses Rhythmbox as its default music player, and this (it turns out) can work neatly with an iPod Touch.  At last!  I can add and remove music without going near iTunes.  I've since bought and uploaded several albums.  Now, I like to scrobble my listening to last.fm - so how to do that?  Well, not problem when playing music from the iPod through Rhythmbox as there's a scrobbler plugin. I noticed there was an app in the App store, iScrobble Premium (there's also an advert-filled free version).  Being rather tight, I thought I'd install the free version to try out.  I decided the purchase price of the premium version was worthwhile, so I did so.  Well here's where my problems started, as I decided to hook the iPod up to iTunes to remove the free iScrobbler app (and one or two other apps). Booted up the WinXP laptop, plugged in USB hard drive , started iTunes.  Nothing appeared to be untoward.  I removed some apps from the iPod, and did a sync.  Some warning messages appeared, which seemed a bit confusing.  I did notice that the space consumed on the iPod seemed a bit reduced.  Only later, when all the cover artwork had disappeared from my iPod did I suspect a problem: it turned out the USB hard drive hadn't been recognised by the laptop.  Ho hum, I thought, I'll remount the drive, restart iTunes and re-sync the iPod.  Well, that took a few hours, and at the end about half the artwork was incorrectly associated with albums. So now I've removed all the music, and I'm re-syncing once again to see if that will cure the problem.  Hope so, this is going to take some time! Update: well that sorted the artwork.  Now to wrestle with iScrobbler! Update 2: tried using iScrobbler, and all the artwork vanished! Update 3:  reloading all the music. Again!

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