Question

I’m thinking of improving my programming skills by making a music player to sync with an iPod/iPhone but there’s no point in even starting if I can’t even access the device! I’ve spent all day googling but can’t seem to find what I’m looking for.

I don’t want to ssh to the iPod or Jailbreak it etc. I’m either looking for a way to access it myself or using what I assume would be a simple script. I know it’s possible because you can use things like ‘iPhone Explorer’..

Thanks 😀

Answer 1

iOS devices do not have a mount point because the computer does not treat them as data drives. Instead, data is sent through usbmuxd, which connects directly through USB. There is a library called libimobiledevice which uses the information reverse engineered by the jailbreaking community to allow you to communicate with iDevices (It doesn’t require a jailbreak unless you want full filesystem access, the jailbreakers were just the ones motivated to do the reverse engineering). According to their homepage, you will also need libgpod to sync music/videos.

If when you say “iPod” you mean non-iOS iPods and not the iPod touch, then they are mounted as normal hard drives. They will show up on your desktop if you use disk mode or turn on the option in iTunes, and can be accessed through the command line otherwise.