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Quick Introduction to iTunes

Apple iTunes is one of the most popular proprietary digital media players in the whole world. Using this no doubts outstanding application you can organize, play music/video files in very comfortable and user friendly way (it’s not an advertisement but real truth). Moreover iTunes is the only way to access Apple’s onilne music store and thus people often seeks the possibility to seamlessly access it after moving to Linux from Mac or Windows.

Well, unfortunately Apple doesn’t believe in magic so there is no native support of iTunes in Linux. At the same time none would deny that Wine does and guys from this project do their best to make things with iTunes in Linux better. In our example we use iTunes 7.3 which comes with Quick Time player 7.1.6, Apple iPhone support and of course iPods of any version, family and generation.

Install Apple iTunes 7.3 in Linux

1. Download iTunes 7.3 from apple.com or filehippo.com

2. Prepare Wine for itunes installation (if not installed do “apt-get install wine -y” or “yum install wine -y” in Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/Redhat/Centos respectively):

$winecfg
wine: creating configuration directory ‘/home/artemn/.wine’…
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
wine: ‘/home/artemn/.wine’ created successfully.

Select your audio driver, it may be something like OSS or Alsa so use one u actually use Set Hardware Acceleration to “Emulation” option. All other Wine settings are per your consideration e.g. Graphics tab.

3. Update richedit30 (Win32 Cabinet Self-Extractor):

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
mv richedit32.dll richedit32.bak
mv richedit20.dll richedit20.bak
wine richedit30.exe

Set richedit20.dll and richedit32.dll as native through winecfg.

4. $wine iTunesSetup.exe
It will open iTune’s installation program under wine so you just install itunes as usually you did it in Windows. If error happens just re-run installer. See screenshot below:

5. Now you can start itunes and go through first run setup (all related screenshots are here). Just don’t care about errors thrown into the console:

$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/iTunes
$ wine itunes.exe

6. That’s it! Now u can use iTunes in Linux as you did it before in other operatin system:

P.S. By the way there are numerous Linux really native alternatives for comfortable music/video organizing and iPod management. At the same time latter can’t be as native and seamless as it’s in iTunes because those playes use Apple’s proprietary file storage system.

But I definitely recommend banshee, amarok and… exaile