Syncing music on Ubuntu

I recently played around with and figured out how to get syncing working with my iPhone 3GS and Ubuntu Lucid. Syncing is supported out of the box so not hard, but you do have to know what packages to install to get the support you need. This should work for iPods as well.

I am using rhythmbox so the following packages are required if using rhythmbox:

• rhythmbox
• rhythmbox-plugins - Without these pretty much nothing but playback works.
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly - for MP3 playback
• gstreamer0.10-plugins - for on the fly Ogg -> MP3 encoding (this is good since iPod doesn’t support Vorbis)

After installing these packages I could get rhythmbox to add my iPhone to the menu on the left and I could drag files into it to sync. Ogg files were converted to MP3 automatically (though with some quality loss).