So, I have an old school iPod I got from someone it’s sweet and I want to put my music on it. Is there a decent app in Linux that will be able to do the sync of music? Or is it able to be just copied to like an external drive?
That works according to rockbox's website (Apple days A1136 is 5th generation, which means it falls within the 1g through 6g "classic")
Heads up though: my primary use was through my car's stereo via USB; it does not work the same. It used to just pop up as a media device that showed the categories to sort by, now it's only treated as a storage device, meaning I have to search through the folders and select the file to open... At least, in theory. It actually just errors trying to index the disk, which it has to do everytime I start the car (which includes switching from only electricity running to turning the engine on). I think it might have issues with the iFlash adapter I installed to replace the hdd (i sprung for the quad microSD adapter, nowadays I'd probably try the SATA SSD adapter as SATA has much quicker read times than SD cards). That's not always the case, just this car, my old truck—with a non-stock stereo—could read it, but would take upwards of 10 minutes to finish indexing (once again, I think it's because of how slow SD cards are).
It took a lot of digging, but I found out the reason is because of the encryption on the Apple firmware, which locks down the hardware it uses to stream as a media adapter. Barring some act of generosity on Apple's part, we likely won't ever see Rockbox able to stream from the iPod to another device.
In that case, you should absolutely do rockbox. It's FOSS, linux compatible, and supports so many other audio formats beyond just mp3, WAV and Apple's m4a and AIFF. E.g.