I Hate Everything, The Musical

This is what I know.

• The iPhone with its wireless-ness and ability to dock with any one of the many iPod speaker devices is not able to scan for an use shared iTunes libraries. This is probably what the supposed OS X iPods are all about.
• If you have a Firewire drive that you've formatted under OS X you need to be sure to disable journaling in order to write to it in Ubuntu.
• Banshee can do recursive searches and export its library over DAAP (the magic happy iTunes sharing protocol) and iTunes will see it but won't ever actually load it.
• Rhythmbox appears to be too stupid to recursively scan a directory looking for music files but if you go to the trouble of adding them one at a time, and then export your music library over DAAP iTunes will not only see it but also let you play it.
• iTunes, meanwhile, will happily show you that your Rhythmbox library contains files that were encoded using Ogg Vorbis but it will not play them. Nope.
• Configuring Sound Juicer, the default Ubuntu CD ripping application, to encode your music as MP3 files is actually pretty easy — once you know what to do. Rather than just being a single button that performs all the necessary magic in background, though, you will need to copy and paste a suitable pipeline command and install stuff with the words ugly and multi-verse in their names. I kid you not.
• Which is mostly worth it because the pain of setting up MP3 encoding on Rythymbox, and playing them through iTunes, is less than the part where it (Rhythmbox or Banshee or any of them, really) is woefully unable to stream anything to an Airport Express hub...maybe.
• Over in left field, Canola, the super magic Do What I Mean media player for the Nokia (Internet) tablets has no clue what to do with iTunes post the 7.0 release. They can see the DAAP shares but that's about it. The good news is that libraries shared from Rhythmbox can be viewed and browsed. The bad news is that the only thing that happens when you try to play a track is an error message.
• Likewise with Tangerine, an open-source cross-platform DAAP server, which runs just great on OS X (you could continue to share your own music with iTunes and then use Tangerine to share the Shared folder, for instance) but has no packages for Ubuntu.
• Since Canola also supports something called uPnP (DAAP for everyone but Apple is the easiest way to think about it) you can install a handy application called GMediaServer on the same box you're running your copy of Rhythmbox on. Then you can export all those music files using a different protocol but at least Canola (or Media Streamer) will play them.
• Unless they were ripped as Ogg Vorbis files. Or the file names start with numbers because that only got fixed in version 0.10 of gmediastreamer and the Ubuntu port is only up to version 0.9 and installing stuff by hand in Ubuntu always ends badly.
• When the N770 was first released, someone ported Rhythmbox but it was pretty flakey then and it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore. There are also libraries for adding Ogg Vorbis support but they lack a proper installer and at least one of the dependencies won't even install under OS 2006.
• Or you want either app to play more than one song at a time without human intervention. Or to even get to the end of the first one. No one, it seems, has any idea why this happens although there's been some speculation that it is caused by incorrect metadata — the duration of a track — being written by iTunes and thus causing uPnP clients to cry. Like babies.
• This remains unclear to me since I ripped a CD as MP3 files using Rhythmbox and observed the same behaviour. Which means I can stop thinking about needing to re-encode all my MP3 files without VBR...
• On the other hand, the overall stability, packaging and ease of installing applications for the N700 (and I'll assume the N800 as well) has improved by several orders of magnitude in the last couple of years.
• And if you go to the trouble of setting up Samba, or some other like system, to mount the above mentioned Firewire drive, plugged in to your Ubuntu machine, on your Mac then you can keep using iTunes to rip CDs because, let's face it, it is fast and the others are not. The others are also, despite advertised, not able to detect new files in your music folder and import them into your library. But I guess you fight the battles you can win.
• Oh, and Series60 phones which all claim to have support for uPnP : That apparently does not include actually being to act as a client and, say, stream music off of another computer. There's just a lot of blather about transferring files from one device to another.
• Speaking of which, you may be interested to know that not only is the recently released Nokia Media Transfer application for OS X brutally slow but it also copies all of the files you are synching from, presumably, iTunes to your phone in its own cache directory. The good news, I guess, is that most people aren't even aware that there are 4GB MicroSD cards never mind 8GB ones.

By which I mean to say : Rock on.