Last post was more along the lines of an announcement, so here’s a more concrete guide. There have been new releases of most parts of the software stack in the past few days, so now is the time to grab them if you’re interested. Libgpod is the exception, since it’s still being worked on to get proper support for the iPhone OS 3.x database. That said, if you’re interested in being an early adopter of iPhone sync support and helping us test it, here’s how.
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Those who watch my git repos may have noticed that I’ve been working on this for a while now. iPhones and iPod Touches have never been properly supported under Linux (especially non-jailbroken devices) because they are just so different from all the previous iPod models. There was a lot of new code to write and Apple hasn’t exactly made it easy either:

• The iPhone uses a custom USB communications protocol, connection-oriented, which is totally different from standard mass storage devices
• It provides multiple services over this protocol, and many have to be interacted with to complete sync
• iPhone OS 2.x brought us a new hash (designed to lock users into iTunes) that so far had not been reverse engineered
• iPhone OS 3.x brought us a new SQLite-based database format which, although a lot more Linux-friendly than the old proprietary format, does require a bunch of new code (and the old format still needs to be supported for compatibility).

Well, I’m happy to say that all of this is coming to an end and that Linux will finally get quite complete iPhone/iPod Touch syncing support soon, thanks to the work of many dedicated people. (more…)

With the new OS version, Apple totally changed up the database format. Now it’s based on a whole bunch of SQLite files and there are also a few files in a format similar to the old proprietary one. There are more than likely still hashes in the critical files, and there’s also a suspicious pair of files that appear to be entirely encrypted. The SQLite format is open and certainly better than the old one, but someone still needs to interface a media player to it.

The upshot of this is that a whole new support library will need to be written or large changes in libgpod need to happen to support the new SQLite format. The DBVersion hack also isn’t going to work – either someone needs to reverse engineer the complete hashing algorithm (and maybe that encrypted file stuff), or the MusicLibrary binary on the phone needs to be patched. So, if you’re currently syncing music with free software, you’ll want to hold off on upgrading to 3.0.

Patching the check out of MusicLibrary looks trivial enough, so although it’s not as easy as the DBVersion hack, it isn’t a real showstopper. The hash algorithm looks the same as the old one, or at least quite similar (and just as badly obfuscated). Those encrypted files do scare me a bit though.

With newer iPods and the iPhone 2.x firmware, Apple decided to implement a new hash scheme for iTunesDB to prevent third-party apps from managing the iPod database. Stupid. They decided to make it part of the FairPlay codebase, including its obfuscation. Very Stupid. But just in case that weren’t enough, then they went ahead and tried to take down the iPodHash project which was attempting to reverse engineer the (annoyingly obfuscated) algorithm. Completely Stupid.

I had previously patched the check out in the MusicLibrary binary, and forgot to write it up. However, I just looked at it again, and it turns out that you can get it to work just by changing a simple XML file. I guess they didn’t really care if jailbroken iPhone users used third-party software.
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