iPod Music Automation <2026, WIP>
Overview
A project to build a local, automated music libary, also an iPod. Hardware and software project with quality check, efficent organisation and device syncing for all my stuff.
music-automanages downloads and the local library.ipod-synccopies the finished library to the iPod.
The music pipeline
Album requests enter the pipeline through Sockseek and Soulseek. music-download prefers lossless results, skips albums already in the clean library, and places new downloads into an inbox.
music-import waits for each album folder to finish changing before processing it. Lossless files are checked with flac-detective to identify suspected transcodes. If one lossless file fails the gate, the complete album is moved to quarantine with an HTML report for manual review; files are never deleted automatically.
Albums that pass are imported into a beets-managed library, with metadata and artwork handled consistently. ReplayGain is then calculated with rsgain, leaving a clean library ready for playback and syncing.
The separate ipod-sync tool copies audio and cover files from the clean library to a Rockbox iPod using rsync. It checks that the device is mounted with a compatible filesystem and uses FAT-safe options to avoid unnecessary copies caused by timestamp and permission differences.
iPod build
This is iPod territory.