Linux Adventures: Getting music I bought on iTunes onto my PC

While I mainly listen to black metal, post-hardcore and similar stuff, I've also been a huge fan of guardin since 2018. He recently released a new EP that I really enjoyed, and I wanted to own it. Not just stream it on Spotify or download it from YouTube with yt-dlp in lower quality, but actually own it.

First challenge: If an artist isn't on Bandcamp and doesn't release CDs, where do you buy their music?
Amazon is evil, and it was twice as expensive on this "Qobuz" platform, so I ended up buying it on iTunes (just like on my iPod Touch all the way back in 2012, haha :D) Surely there will be an easy way to download it to my PC.

Well, it's Apple, so of course you can't just download your music from their website, no idea what I was expecting. Now, I could have tried to install iTunes with Wine, but I hate that stupid software and one quick search told me that this is a MASSIVE pain on Linux.

Let's just connect my phone via usb and see what happens: nothing

Turns out, you need a cross-platform protocol library called libimobildevice to access iOS devices on Arch.

So I fired up the terminal, installed this with pacman, was finally able to access the files on my phone, and that should have been the end of it... but we're just getting started!

The directory for downloaded music on an iPhone looks like this:

So what now? Can I please just have my music without having to play some kind of hacking mini-game?

I don't want to click every single file and listen to it in order to figure out what 5929498651869451530.m4a might be.

That's how I found out about MusicBrainz Picard!
A music tagger that reads metadata and uses something called "acoustic fingerprinting" to identify and tag music.(...and if it doesn't find a match or an incorrect one because the album is too new, you can manually help)

Using this wasn't exactly intuitive, but I managed to turn this:

Into this:

What an adventure!

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Reese2500

1781941782

what did you use to put music on the ipod, mediamonkey or sum?

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