Has anyone ever successfully used the libimobiledevice library to manage music on an iPhone with Rhythmbox? If so, I will keep beating my head against the wall until I succeed.
i don’t know exactly what functionality it offers since i don’t have an idevice to test it with, but mx linux (and probably antiX too?) has a program called idevice mounter that might be worth a look in a virtual machine or maybe live usb to see if it helps in your situation.
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I found a Snap Store version of libimobledevice that supposedly includes all the dependencies, and I suppose it does, and I installed it. I found a web page that describes the usage of libiimobiledevice and some of the libimobiledevice-utils in some detail. I even was able to mount the iPhone at /media/iphone using the ifuse utility. In Thunar there are three iPhone icons. One is a camera icon that shows the DCIM folder of the iPhone. Another one is a Document folder that does not show any documents but shows the icons for the apps on the iPhone. The third one shows a drive icon but when I clicked on it first I got “You do not have permission to view this folder” and later a message saying “Folder is empty.” Interstingly, the iPhone does not show up as a device at all in Rhythmbox.
I have always been able view the iPhone DCIM folder and transfer photos to the computer with Ubuntu without any special software, it just works in Ubuntu. The Documents folder view does not seem useful since it doesn’t show any actual documents. And the drive icon, if it allowed access to the contents of the iPhone, would be great, but it seems Apple has this locked down tight.
So I guess I am defeated unless some ItsFOSS user has somehow succeeded in accessing their iPhone from Linux with libimobiledevice, or any other method. So, if anybody has had success, please speak up now and share your secrets!
Thanks!