I upgraded to karmic a week or two ago, and I think (not 100% sure) this was the first time I synced music with rhythmbox after the upgrade -- I've been syncing using rhythmbox ever since I bought the iPod about a year ago in jaunty (the 9.04 version -- I think it was jaunty).

In either case, I have an iPod Nano 8GB (model no. A1285). I had a coupe of gbs of music on it and went in and deleted and added a bunch of songs earlier. When I finally tried to eject the device through rhythmbox I got a "Device is busy" message, so I closed rhythmbox and looked around for some other app or terminal which might be sitting on the iPod, found none, then finally ejected by right clicking on the IPOD icon on the desktop. The iPod shows up with "0 songs". I plug it back in and in rhythmbox, all the songs are there as they should. So I try removing them all, then ejecting, then pluggging back in, then adding some songs and ejecting, but it still shows up with 0 songs.

After this, I tried Amarok but it won't find the device. I tried Banshee but it won't find the device. The only app that finds it is rhythmbox, but it just can't seem to make the iPod recognize the songs it puts on. The iPod keeps saying "0 songs", whereas rhythmbox keeps saying "it's all there".

So I deleted all files in the /media/IPOD/ folder and ejected. This reset the device -- got the Apple logo, had to choose language etc. and all. Plugging it back in, rhythmbox now says it wants to initialize it and asks me to pick model and give it a name. I obediently do so and am followed by a long wait and an error, which says that the file ".../SysInfo" is empty. I go in and fill that file in with the 16 digit id (detailed elsewhere, for Amarok IIRC), save, eject, remount, try it in rhythmbox and this time it looks like it's working, but rhythmbox doesn't ACTUALLY change the name even though it asks me for one (it still goes "iPod"). I try to put one song on, eject it, but nothing shows up. "0 songs".

I reformat the IPOD from the desktop, eject it, get the "choose language" stuff again, plug it back in, try adding one song to it, eject it, and still "0 songs".

I got a hold of a Windows user who let me plug the iPod into his box, and upon starting iTunes, iTunes claimed that the iPod was corrupted and needed recovering. So it promptly went and downloaded a 60 mb or so file from Apple and upgraded the firmware + restored the iPod to factory defaults. I put two songs from my friend's computer onto it to test thru iTunes and it worked fine. Then I went back home, tried to put a song on it in rhythmbox, ejected, and it shows "2 songs" -- it's not seeing the song from rhythmbox.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Nov 29 22:38:45 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/rhythmbox
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: rhythmbox 0.12.5-0ubuntu5
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
SourcePackage: rhythmbox
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic x86_64