Why I hate Apple (still)
For a while now I’ve been getting reports of people having a strange problem using their iPod with Banshee or Dopi. There is a file on the device that we use to get things like the model number, which tells us what sort of iPod we’re dealing with. That file has been removed or set to 0 length on newer firmwares, and I was just yesterday able to reproduce it after upgrading and restoring my iPod Video. Since it wasn’t stored on the filesystem anymore, I started poking around the firmware parition, and found several copies of it there. Unfortunately it seems to appear in different places depending on the device, so I haven’t yet found a reliable way of getting that stuff out. We’ll eventually figure it out, though, and at that point things should start working again. I have a totally gross solution which runs strings(1) on the partition, but I don’t think it will come to that 
September 14th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
[…] Snorp and I absolutely hate Apple. With almost every release of a new iPod device, firmware, or even iTunes updates, there’s a chance that they have royally screwed us into not being compatible with them. Most often there are only minor changes to the iTunesDB database format, and they’re easy to cope with. Sometimes they hit hard. […]
September 14th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Sweet! I hope you can fix this, because it’s been driving me nuts. I’ve been at the point of giving up on Banshee, and almost even considering installing KDE on my machine so I can run Juk or Amarok to try one of those. I have a 60 G iPod Video, and it worked fine with Banshee up until I synchronized it on my wife’s windows PC in iTunes, and it updated the firmware. It has shown up with a blank screen in Banshee ever since.
Keep up the good work.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:03 am
[…] The iPod situation is now mostly fixed. I was able to figure out how iTunes gets the iPod serial number (and other info) with the help of a USB monitoring tool and Matt Dharm (the usb-storage guy). After that, Aaron used the metric ton of SysInfo samples you guys sent in to get a serial number -> model number mapping. […]