Since getting iTunes running smoothly on my Ubuntu server under VirtualBox I was looking to upgrade and automate my CD ripping process. My aim here was to have a near 'zero click' approach for ripping an inserted CD to FLAC for opensource goodness and then to convert the files to ALAC for iTunes compatibility and HomeSharing. The two click solution I've reached involves 1) to select the right CD metadata from an CD info site and 2) to hit the button to rip, the script does the rest. It now takes me under 15 minutes to rip a CD to FLAC and get it into iTunes and shared over HomeSharing with just two clicks, here's how...
N.B. As of October 2011 ALAC is now open source too.
After experiencing intermittent success with iTunes under Wine since upgrading iTunes to 10.4.1; both from the perspective of iTunes working with Wine and also with Wine/iTunes worknig with Apple TV2 (ATV2). I've decided to bite the bullet and run iTunes within a virtual instance of Windows XP running on top of Ubuntu 10.04. I've tried this on both an Intel Atom based server (without native support for virtualisation) and with an AMD Neo server (with native virtualisation support). I've had good results on both set ups using Oracles free VirtualBox and Windows XP SP3, best of all it was rather simple - here's how...
I run iTunes under Wine on my Ubuntu server to share media to an Apple TV 2 using Home sharing. Since upgrading to iTunes 10.4.1 under Wine I've had regular issues with my Apple TV 2 no longer seeing the Ubuntu based iTunes Home share after a period of time. The easy way I've found to fix this is to kill iTunes in Wine and restart it is as follow a helpful script to achieve this follows...
