• Q: Why doesn't my iPhone / iPod Touch show up?
  A: Neither iPhone nor iPod Touch can be mounted as ordinary removable devices without help of third party solutions.

• Q: How do I share the iTunesFS filesystem via Samba?
  A: Unfortunately, sharing the iTunesFS filesystem via Samba doesn't work. I have tried to debug the issue in the past and came to the conclusion, that the problem is buried deep in FUSE/Samba interaction. If anybody can shed any light on this issue any hints are appreciated. For the time being, resort to sharing iTunesFS via Apache.

• Q: Can I use the Fink package of MacFUSE instead of the Google one?
  A: No, you need MacFUSE Core as stated on the download page, sorry!

Please note that it's normal for iTunesFS not to bounce in your dock! This is intended behaviour, as iTunesFS is not really an ordinary Desktop application with a menu, but rather a file system (you can tell that by looking at the screenshot in case you still have doubts).

If you don't see the iTunesFS Volume appear in Finder shortly after you started the application, something unexpected has happened…

Popular reasons that cause iTunesFS to fail are:

• Update: since version 1.1.9, iTunesFS can detect the location of the iTunes Music Library properly!

  iTunesFS expects the iTunes Music Library.xml file to be in the standard default place, that is ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml (where ~ designates your home directory). If you happen to have changed that location, all is not lost - fancy iTunesFS sports a nifty user default just for that case! ;-) Open Terminal.app and type the following:

  defaults write com.mulle-kybernetik.znek.iTunesFS Library COMPLETE_QUALIFIED_PATH_TO_YOUR_ITUNES_XML_FILE

  Make sure to apply proper quoting/escaping in a shell, i.e. use backslash escapes for spaces and the like. For setting the path to the default library file in a proper manner, you would have to type:

  defaults write com.mulle-kybernetik.znek.iTunesFS Library ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml

What about the iPhone and iPod Touch?

As you might know, neither iPhone nor iPod Touch can be mounted as an ordinary removable device as previous iPod generations allowed you to. However, there are efforts on the way to make that happen nevertheless. Using one of these projects, it's pretty easy to convince iTunesFS to read the contents of such a device. Following is a mail thread detailling a possible method. Enjoy!

Marcus Müller wrote on 13/08/09 at 2:17 chantantes :

I finally found some time to work on this again. I added iTunesCDB support (new database format introduced with firmware 3.0) to iTunesFS which makes it possible to read iPhones running firmware 3.0 in iTunesFS, given that they are already mounted with iphonedisk. I've put Pedram in Cc as he had a similar request. The prerequisite is to get iphonedisk and mount your iPod/iPhone with this first. I downloaded the source, built the project with 'make' and used the mount.sh shellscript to mount my jailbroken iPhone. I had to modify the mount.sh commandline from the iphonedisk sources in order to work properly with my installed MacFUSE (like this):

#!/bin/sh
# Auhor: Allen Porter
mkdir /Volumes/iPhone
./iphonedisk_mount -o volname=iPhone -o volicon=./iPhoneDisk.icns /Volumes/iPhone

As written in a previous mail, I recommend a modification closer to the original script:

mkdir /Volumes/iPhone
./iphonedisk_mount -o defer_auth -o volname=iPhone -o volicon=./iPhoneDisk.icns /Volumes/iPhone

When I execute this script in a shell, I get this:

$ ./mount.sh
Initializaing.
Waiting for device...
Initializing filesystem.
Mounting iPhone Volume.

Yes, I even got an extra line number 5:
kextload: /Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext loaded successfully

Looking at the contents of /Volumes/iPhone I see this:

$ ls -l /Volumes/iPhone/
total 136
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jan 1 1970 ApplicationArchives/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 136 Jan 1 1970 DCIM/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 102 Jan 1 1970 Downloads/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 136 Jan 1 1970 Photos/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jan 1 1970 Podcasts/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jan 1 1970 PublicStaging/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 68 Jan 1 1970 Purchases/
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 136 Jan 1 1970 Recordings/
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 0 Jan 1 1970 com.apple.itdbprep.postprocess.lock
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 0 Jan 1 1970 com.apple.itunes.lock_sync
drwxrwxrwx 2 root wheel 204 Jan 1 1970 iTunes_Control/
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 30624 Jan 1 1970 jailbreak.log

Yes. I got exactly the same files and folders (except the last line ;-))

Although /Volumes/iPhone is properly mounted (via FUSE), it won't show up automatically when launching iTunesFS... as a workaround, you have to use the iPodMountPoints user default, i.e.:
-iPodMountPoints '( /Volumes/iPhone )'

I spent some time trying to understand when and where to enter this option for iTunesFS. Finally, I simply typed the equivalent following command (in Terminal for instance):

defaults write com.mulle-kybernetik.znek.iTunesFS iPodMountPoints -array /Volumes/iPhone

I hope this is correct. Out of curiosity, what was your idea to enter the option you wrote above?

The above statement can be passed on the command line as is. The user defaults concept is fairly old (from the NeXT days) but very well thought-through, indeed. If you pass defaults on the command line, they are never made persistent - very good for testing. The only drawback is that the notation is a bit different. Usually, ordinary users never come in touch with the command line (or better: they shouldn't be forced to hit the command line), but in our case I think it's feasible to do this, since we're still investigating. ;-) So, to clarify, you could have started iTunesFS the following way from the command line:

$ ./iTunesFS.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesFS -iTunesFileSystemDebugEnabled YES -iPodMountPoints '( /Volumes/iPhone )'

Using all these tricks, I can finally mount my iPhone in iTunesFS:

I confirm. This worked very well for me. I browsed some parts of my music hierarchy, and I backed up file to my local hard drive successfully. Seem perfect.