argh.
See, this is why i don't have an iPhone.
A few days ago, the media database on my iPhone crapped out. Suddenly, the 6GB of music and podcasts were no longer accessible. This, of course, was right before i was planning on a long trip, which made me say lots of very naughty things. So i did a "Restore from Backup" (which i had thankfully made a few days ago). Nope, no soap there. Still no media. So did a hard restore of the beastie and then recovered again.
The apps were there, but the media database wasn't. Yay!
So i did the following:
- mounted apple under linux with iFuse
- removed /com.apple.itdbprep.postprocess.lock & /com.apple.itunes.lock_sync
- copied /iTunes_Control/Music/* to backup location (got DRM'd stuff? your life sucks.)
- deleted the contents of /iTunes_Control/Music/*
- find $backupDir -type f -exec grep -i podcast {} \; -delete
- reconnected under windows
- relaunched iTunes.
- copied my remotely mounted backup dir to local windows box
- dragged contents of backup into ipod's "Music" directory in iTunes.
- interrupted "gapless playback" bs.
Hey look! Media's back!
Lessons learned:
- "Backup" doesn't do what you think it does.
- DRM sucks in ways you can't imagine, never buy music you can't play with vlc.
- iPods may be running an advanced OS, but apparently rebuilding an index from stored files is beyond it's capacity.
- Music playback is the NUMBER ONE THING that this device should do, yet it's fragile. Why should i spend several hundred dollars for a phone built on the same technology?
