Library and GUI for Apple's iPod Files

Playcounts & Rating
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Whenever you play a track completely on the iPod (firmware version 1.3
or higher) a counter in a the "Play Counts" file will be increased by
one. The same file also contains the rating you can set with the 3rd
generation iPods.

This file appears to be deleted whenever the iPod resets itself --
e.g. because you disconnect it from the computer. Therefore, be
careful... Charging the iPod seems to do no harm.

When gtkpod is started, it will also read this file and incorporate
the information into the iTunesDB that can be written back to the
iPod.

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There have been several requests to also register playcounts when
playing a track on the local machine. This is possible by calling
gtkpod as "gtkpod -p <filename>".
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If gtkpod is already running, the playcount of that track there will
be increased by one. If gtkpod is not already running, the playcount
will be registered in ~/.gtkpod/offline_playcount. This file will be
read the next time you import the iTunesDB from your iPod, and the
playcounts will be updated accordingly.

Please note that if you start several instances of gtkpod, only the
first instance will register playcounts through "gtkpod -p".

Now all you have to do is tell your favorite player to call gtkpod
with the filename of the played track.

For xmms this is possible as of July 18th, 2004 (CVS
version). Versions before that (including 1.2.10) only allow you to
have an external program called at the beginning of a track. Our patch
allows to have an external program called also at the end of a track.

In each case you will need to activate the "General Plugin" called
"song_change" and configure it to call 'gtkpod -p "%f"'.