jmtd → log → ipod → iPod refresh

Recently I filled up the storage in my iPod and so planned to upgrade it. one. This is a process I've been through several times in the past. My routine used to be to buy the largest capacity SD card that existed at the time (usually twice the capacity of the current one) and spend around £90. Luckily, SD capacity has been growing faster than my music collection. You can buy 400G SD cards today, but I only bought a 200G one, and I only spent around £38.

As I wrote last time, I don't use iTunes: I can move music on and off it from any computer, and I choose music to listen to using a simple file manager. One drawback of this approach is I tend to listen to the same artists over and over, and large swathes of my collection lie forgotten about. The impression I get is that music managers like iTunes have various schemes to help you keep in touch with the rest of your collection, via playlists: "recently added", "stuff you listened to this time last year", or whatever.

As a first step in this direction, I decided it would be useful to build up playlists of recently modified (or added) files. I thought it would be easiest to hook this into my backup solution. In case it's of interest to anyone else, I thought I'd share my solution. The scheme I describe there is used to run a shell script to perform the syncing, which now looks (mostly) like this:

date="$(/bin/date +%Y-%m-%d)"
plsd=/home/jon/pls

make_playlists()
{
    grep -v deleting \
        | grep -v '/\._' \
        | grep -E '(m4a|mp3|ogg|wav|flac)$' \
        | tee -a "$plsd/$date.m3u8"
}

# set the attached blinkstick LED to a colour indicating "work in progress"
# systemd sets it to either red or green once the job is complete
blinkstick --index 1 --limit 10 --set-color 33c280

# sync changes from my iPod onto my NAS; feed the output of files changed
# into "make_playlists"
rsync -va --delete --no-owner --no-group --no-perms \
    --exclude=/.Spotlight-V100 --exclude=/.Trash-1000 \
    --exclude=/.Trashes --exclude=/lost+found /media/ipod/ /music/ \
    | make_playlists

# sync all generated playlists back onto the iPod
rsync -va --no-owner --no-group --no-perms \
    /home/jon/pls/ /media/ipod/playlists/

Time will tell whether this will help.