iTunes Music Store

Apple's iTunes Music Store sells music online with a large selection of artists. Songs are in 256kbps AAC format, and cost varies by country. Apple only officially supports Mac and Windows clients, but the store can be browsed from Linux as well.

An unofficial plugin for the Banshee Player supports the store but needs to be obtained from subversion and compiled. There is also no guarantee it will work with changes to the itunes store. You can also use Wine or CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office to install the Windows version of iTunes on Ubuntu (note that support for Itunes on both of these platforms is extremely limited). This will allow you to buy iTunes songs on Linux and listen to them. However, be aware that any non-iTunes-Plus purchased songs will be useless outside of iTunes or an iPod, because they are encrypted for the purpose of restricting their use. Because of this restriction, it is a better idea to buy and rip CDs, or purchase music from sites that offer unencrypted MP3 or OGG files.

Playing M4As

You simply need to install the Ubuntu Restricted packages.

Playing MP4s

If you already have songs in the old iTunes format (mp4) and they haven't been converted to the new format (m4a), you will need to convert them using a tool such as Requiem.

Alternatively, you can also do it the hard way. In iTunes, if you burn a CD with all the tracks from the same album, then iTunes will include necessary information for other music software to identify the CD. You can then rip the CD just like any other audio CD. This is a very tedious way to go about transferring a music library, but it works if you have only a few albums that you really want to add to your Linux collection.

iTunesU / Podcasts

Viewing in Firefox

There is an easy method to show itms or itmss podcasts / itunesU in Firefox:

To view it, first install these extensions: UA switcher Greasemonkey

This script should make it viewable. Sometimes a site may want iTunes/8.0 or similar useragent.

Other Tools

Programs that allow access to podcasts and media: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtunesu/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/tunesviewer/ http://www.zerologic.com/Blog/How-to-get-the-original-RSS-feed-for-a-podcast-in-iTunes.html http://my.opera.com/newlifenarrabri/blog/2009/10/18/itunes-podcasts-under-linux