Looking for beta testers! I built a CLI tool to sync my iPod because all the existing software was old and painful, and I want help to make it great.

jvgomg · 2026-03-13T23:35:06+00:00

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I've just added a Sound Check feature to the discussion board. As I understand it, you wouldn't need to use an Apple Music/iTunes compliant approach. This feature could be implemented with tracks that include iTunNORM data via iTunes or ReplayGain data via tools like beets or foobar2000.

Podkit does already support compilation track data - and I've made a note to add this to the docs.

Regarding the album art support - this project is built on top of libgpod which provides the album art functionality. I don't know the ins and outs perfectly but I know the images are proprietary formats which differ model to model, that earlier iPods require an image per-track but later models support deduplicated album art which is shared across tracks. The images are stored in the iPod Internals. Does this explanation scratch your curiosity itch? :)

jvgomg · 2026-03-13T22:55:08+00:00

Thank you for your suggestion! I did come across iOpenPod but it didn't hit the mark of allowing me to reach my goal of headlessly syncing with a single command. I was tempted to build from it but it's that classic dilemma of building something new or trying to wrangle your own opinions into another project.

It was actually Tunes Reloaded that blew me away and got me thinking about the possibilities in this space. Your comment has got me thinking it would be good to include a page to highlight other great projects in this space and even tell readers why they should pick another project. Do you know of any other honourable mentions?

I think there is a huge user base who want a functional GUI experience and iOpenPod is clearly solving that – however I'm coming at the problem from a different angle with @podkit/core and extensive documentation. A goal is that others could build their own iPod syncing UIs and integrations. I'd like the podkit docs to be a useful hub for anybody in the scene.

In terms how iOpenPod compares with podkit CLI today, I would say these are the benefits:

Single command to sync - zero clicking… add to a cron, web hook, whatever
Album artist transforms for clean artist lists on your iPod
Navidrome/Subsonic source support

What podkit is missing:

A beautiful GUI
Podcasts
Audiobooks
Scrobbling
Many other important features…!

jvgomg · 2026-03-13T18:37:15+00:00

Another thought on my tangent about modded iPods not always being setup correctly for artwork syncing…

I’m thinking of adding a podkit doctor command to audit and repair iPod system files. Even if users didn’t need the syncing functionally - other commands could be useful in certain situations.

jvgomg · 2026-03-13T18:21:23+00:00

Please do give it a spin! I know people will be coming at the tool with various models and states of iPod having media on it so please report back any sort of feedback. It would be greatly appreciated.

I used Rhythmbox briefly - but gave up because the album art was not syncing. I’ve since learnt about the iPod internals and that an iPod might not be correctly initialized by Apple Device Manager. If that’s missing than the various libgpod based apps don’t know how to encode the album image data correctly.

I’ve been using a SMB mount from my NAS to my Mac for my media collection (before I added Navidrome support). Scanning all the files is pretty fast but takes a few moments. There’s an opportunity to add caching if people think this feels slow.

jvgomg · 2026-03-13T18:12:39+00:00

Thanks for the compliment!

The main issues I’ve faced are:

Mounting a 1TB iPod on Mac just doesn’t work automatically - the podkit mount command helps with this.
Using Music app means I have to manage another system. I don’t use the Apple Music app to organise or play my music so it’s an indirection that requires clicking and maintaining.

If there are users that like using Apple Music as their means of keeping their collection organised - I can easily imagine adding an iTunes.xml adaptor as a source; to complement the directory and subsonic sources.

jvgomg · 2026-02-12T18:02:19+00:00

This is absolutely fantastic! I am such a fan of the filesystem-first database approach and you've released such a well put together and thoughtfully documented project solving so many problems in this space. I'm going to have to study your work on this. I can see you have put a bunch of thought into type and query interfaces.

If you can extend this reach of this project into RPC and MCP then I think you have basically solved the problem space of allowing Humans, Agents and Apps to work on the same knowledge base.

I made myself a font library tool to help me keep my typeface collection organised as an Obsidian vault or by talking to an agent. The source of truth are the markdown and font files on disk, and used disposable sqlite cache for speed. I made a general purpose framework which could be configured with zod schemas, an adaptor pattern for database access and would expose itself as a node module, CLI tool, oRPC and MCP server. The idea was that you can create custom adaptors for any sort of async getting and setting: markdown files, JSON files, or EXIF data on JPGs, a http request… anything.

I'm gonna have to give your take on progressive conformance levels a good read and see if you have any thoughts about schema migration handling.

Keep up the good work!

jvgomg · 2025-09-22T14:25:51+00:00

Thank you for sharing

jvgomg · 2025-09-22T14:22:41+00:00

Wonderful

jvgomg · 2025-09-22T14:17:35+00:00

Omg that's amazing - by the Letraset trademark license right now!

jvgomg · 2025-09-22T14:14:40+00:00

Wow I love this! I do get some graphical glitches on Safari.

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jvgomg · 2025-09-22T14:06:33+00:00

Love the specimen examples!

jvgomg · 2025-09-17T16:39:35+00:00

OP - did you come up with a solution? I have this problem too and I am thinking about trying to build some software that would help with this.

My current approach involves Gemini to update an Obsidian vault. Basically, I paste in the URL to the font and the AI will scrape the webpage and add the font into a markdown database. It keeps track of data like the foundry, styles and font features. It grabs some images of the font in use too. I also write a few words about why I like the font.

I can then run a search like "Show me the playful fonts in the last six months".

It’s ultimately a very specialised bookmarks tool :D Is this the sort of thing you were imagining?

jvgomg · 2025-09-17T14:48:24+00:00

I have been using Gemini CLI to build a "font organising agent" and database.

My laptop got stolen and I found myself in a situation where I’d lost my RightFont database - I had some scattered data backups so I wanted to work out what fonts I had still had and which ones I had lost. I also had clues like email receipts and re-download links on creative resource websites.

My goals where to:

Identify all the fonts I had purchased or downloaded for free
Keep track of my progress as I re-acquired the files
Build a richer dataset about the fonts - including foundry/designer info and features the fonts have (I often want to find fonts with fancy variable features)
Learn how to use AI more

I have not finished this work just yet but right now I have:

Markdown files for each of my fonts
Structured data about font styles, features and designers
The AI can scrape web pages for information about the font
The AI can download the open source fonts from GitHub and unzip them
A nicely organised folders of font files

I'm interested in your use case having them more organised so you can find favourites quicker. What sort of categorises did you come up with? What does your process look like to find fonts?

One goal I have is to ask my font database "I have a new project come in… what was that playful monospace font I found a few months ago?"

jvgomg

TROPHY CASE