How to mount an iPod in linux

I'm currently trying to get rid of my iPod and move all my music to my android phone. Needless to say my iTunes installation on the PC is long gone and these iDevices are the proverbial bottomless bit - you'll never get anything back out of them, or do you?

Thanks to the libimobiledevice and ifuse projects, you can now mount an ipod like any normal usb stick in linux, and it doesn't even have to be a rooted device.

# get ready
aptitude install ifuse
mkdir /media/ipod

# mount
ifuse /media/ipod

# unmount
umount /media/ipod

If you want to mount the device as a normal user, make sure that user is part of the ifuse group.

And that's how to mount your iPod. Making a backup is as easy as calling 'cp -r' or rsync. However, the music files' filenames are completely fubard and since my id3 tags aren't that good I'll need to work with the sqlite3 db that apple stores information in but I'm still working on that part.