Ankimini audio on the iPod: can I hear it now?

Yes! But a small amount of manual muckery is required.

Here are the rough steps that I followed to get an Anki deck working with audio on my iPod Touch (2nd gen, on IOS4):

1. Jailbreak the iPod. This was actually so easy that it will be hard to suppress an ear-to-ear grin. Just going to that link and opening a cleverly broken PDF file exploits a bug (presumably a stack smash) to execute arbitrary code and install Cydia. You don't even need to reboot the device! Very different from the iPhone OS 3 jailbreak that I used last time, but this will probably become impossible soon (until someone finds the next suitable vulnerability).


2. Install Ankimini from the Cydia or Rock package managers. Easy peasy.


3. Create or download the deck in Anki (desktop). Get your deck working on a desktop machine as normal, then sync it with an online account.


4. Sync your deck in Ankimini. This should be straightforward.


5. Copy across the media files. From my Mac, the command to do so was scp -r ~/Documents/Anki/deckname.media/ mobile@ipod_ip_address:~/.anki

I then stopped and started Anki via an SBSettings button, but I don't think this step is necessary. Now I can learn and listen to spoken Chinese in "dead time" (i.e. when I'm on a bus or taking a shite). Brilliant!

On a related note, I would like to try the new AnkiMobile, but it's just a bit too expensive for me at the moment. I think the developer may be pricing himself out of the market - you don't see (proportionally) many iPhone applications that cost €20. At an uneducated, not-thought-through guess, I'd wager that more than twice as many people would buy the program if the price was halved. Hopefully it works out anyway, after the tremendous work he's put into Anki.