iTunes in Ubuntu

iTunes is both a curse and a blessing. It's a nice portal for managing your iPod/iPhone, syncing your music, and accessing the iTunes Music Store. However it's irritating that in order to do a lot with your Apple gadget, you must use iTunes to manage it (without hacking it). Because of this, I have never bought an iPod. My mp3 player is a basic Creative Zen Stone 2GB w/ Speaker, because it's inexpensive, works just fine, and works as a USB flash drive when I connect it, so it's very easy to manage.

Recently, though, two things occured at the same time that forced me to touch iTunes. At church, we're putting on a live feed of Dave Ramsey. In case of an emergency, though, we're given access to three videos of Dave that are...only available via iTunes. Tarnation. Also, I've been following Jonathan Strickland and his work on the TechStuff podcast, and they prefer the downloads go through iTunes so they can track the downloads. I want to support them as much as I can, so I felt bad downloading mp3s from the RSS feed.

So, a compromise, and an experiment. Can I run iTunes in Ubuntu? Falling back on the ever-faithful Crossover, I downloaded iTunes 8 and installed it. And failed. Without any detail, the installer fails to work. :/ Hmm... So I get to looking and, nestled away in the depths of the iTunes website, I find iTunes 7.3.2 for Windows 2000. Already this feels promising. So I fire up Crossover and get the installer going. Some errors, but the program did install. :)

iTunes 7 via Crossover on Ubuntu is not ideal. I have no idea what works and what doesn't, but it felt very flaky and very very sluggish. Nonetheless, I was able to get to the iTunes Music Store and download what I need. Again, it's very flaky - it's hard to even pause or stop a download once it's going. And you can't quit the program during a download unless you force quit it. And I get a box reporting a registry error about CD burning (to be expected). But, if the goal is to get to the iTunes Music Store, that's doable.



Ubuntu running iTunes via Crossover, checking out the TechStuff Podcast on the Music Store.



Downloading an episode of the TechStuff Podcast



The registry error I get each time I start iTunes, but isn't a problem unless trying to get iTunes to make CDs.