About This Project

Who I Am

I’m James Greenaway, a software designer and developer from the UK. TypeScript is my weapon of choice and podkit is the project I’ve wanted to exist for years.

Why podkit Exists

A while back I modded a 5th generation iPod with an iFlash adapter – my Terapod. I was excited to finally have a nostalgic music player with serious storage, but the iPod ended up in a drawer because getting music onto it was just so painful.

I primarily use Mac and Linux. The only viable sync option I had was booting up a Windows machine I rarely use, opening the terrible combination of Apple Music and Apple Device Manager, and clicking through dodgy dialogs. My music collection had to be mirrored into iTunes or I had to surrender to using Apple Music full time. iPod software support has degraded over the years and the whole experience was neither fun nor easy.

Then I discovered beets for organising and tagging music and Navidrome for making my collection accessible anywhere. This rekindled my interest in properly owning my music collection and I pulled out the dusty iPod.

I wanted a Linux-centric approach so I could centralise music syncing onto a Proxmox VM or LXC container. I tried everything. Running an old version of iTunes under Wine, gtkpod, and eventually Strawberry. I even patched a transcoding bug I found in Strawberry’s code. But album artwork wouldn’t sync consistently (I’ve since learnt enough about iPod internals to understand why) and there was no good incremental sync. Dropping a batch of songs onto the iPod would just create duplicates.

Through debugging Strawberry’s code I discovered that libgpod powered its iPod functionality. At that point I’d learnt enough about the state of the aging iPod software ecosystem to know that nothing out there actually solved my problem. I needed syncing to be effortless. Update my iPod with a single command, no clicking, no thinking. So I built a native Node.js binding around libgpod called libgpod-node and wrote a first prototype. podkit grew from there.

How It’s Built

podkit is designed around a few core beliefs.

One command, zero thinking. Syncing an iPod should be effortless. You run podkit sync, walk away, and your iPod is up to date. No GUI, no clicking, no babysitting.

A core library, not just a CLI. podkit is structured as a monorepo with a clear separation between the core library (podkit-core) and the CLI (podkit-cli). The core package contains all the knowledge about syncing, transcoding, diffing, and iPod management. The CLI is just one interface built on top of it. The same core could power a TUI, a desktop app, or someone else’s project entirely.

Tested against real hardware. There’s a robust end-to-end test framework that runs against virtual iPod databases for fast iteration, but we verify support on real devices. If a device is listed as supported, it’s been tested with an actual iPod.

Smart transcoding. Lossless files get transcoded, compatible lossy files are copied directly, and nothing is re-encoded unnecessarily. Your source files are never touched.

The iPod is a solved problem. The software isn’t. There’s a wealth of undocumented knowledge about using iPods today. Edge cases, firmware quirks, OS-specific issues. podkit aims to document that knowledge and bake it into the tool so you don’t have to figure it out yourself.

Collections, devices, config. The problem is modelled as three concepts. Your music lives in collections (local directories, Subsonic servers), you sync to devices (your iPods), and configuration ties them together. Simple enough to be flexible without being complicated.

Stock firmware first, then beyond. By solving the hard problem of syncing with Apple’s stock iPod firmware and the iTunesDB format, podkit builds a foundation that can extend to easier targets in the future. Devices like Rockbox-flashed iPods or standalone DAPs.

Where It’s Going

My personal end goal is this: I plug my iPod into a headless computer, get a notification on my phone about what new music will be synced, and then another notification when it’s done and I can unplug. No screen, no keyboard, no interaction.

The bigger vision is for podkit to become the go-to project for syncing music to iPod devices, and a library that lets other developers build iPod syncing into their own apps. I’m hoping that the iPod community can help develop this into something robust, well-documented, and always up to date.

That’s a big goal for a one-person project, which is why community involvement matters so much. The roadmap is shaped by real feedback from real users, and I’m actively looking for beta testers to help get podkit to where it needs to be.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Come say hello and help shape what podkit becomes.