Now that I’ve gotten pretty far with ripping my CD collection and properly tagging the MP3s I already had, I ran into a minor iPod annoyance. I have about 20GB and more than 3300 songs in my iTunes library at this point, all of which I sync to my 60GB iPod. A bunch of my albums are collections from various artists - mostly industrial / electronic / goth samplers, 80s collections, tribute albums, etc....
I just set my Linux box up as an iTunes server. After seeing how easy it was to get this working (not least because of Gentoo’s excellent package management), I’m almost annoyed at myself for putting this off for so long. :) The HOWTO Apple ITunes Server document on the Gentoo Wiki was absolutely on the spot and made this very easy, and the entire installation only consisted of a handful of comments plus some very simple config file changes....
Today I went to the Apple Store and bought an AirPort Express Base Station. I had been looking for a good way of listening to MP3s in the living room, and after my boss mentioned how we was using an AirPort Express and a set of PC speakers to stream music into his kitchen, I decided to give it a shot. I have to admit that I’m very impressed with this little device....
I haven’t tried it yet, but it is possible to set up Linux as an iTunes server, allowing any Windows or Apple machines on the network running iTunes to browse and play any music on that server. This sounds ideal for me, as my music collection lives on my desktop PC that usually runs Linux, while my wife and I often use our wireless laptops. This should even allow us to easily sync music to out iPods, albeit over the relatively slow 54Mbps wireless connection (which is why I usually just hook up my iPod to my desktop for this purpose)....
I am currently using both Linux and Windows with my iPod. So far, I have found iTunes to be far superior to any of the Linux applications for syncing songs to my iPod, so I usually dual boot into Windows for this purpose (which isn’t all that often these days, now that I’ve got a fair amount of songs on my iPod to get me started until I’ve had a chance to clean up the ID3 tags for the rest of my MP3 collection and rip my remaining CDs)....