Syncing an iPod or iPhone with Cocoa

I'm creating an iTunes clone in Cocoa (don't ask why, it's not evil) and I want to be able to sync my iPod with it. This means: music, photos, videos and podcasts. I couldn't really find anything, since Google only shows articles about iPod touch and iPhone programming, but I'm actually creating a desktop applicatio开发者_高级运维n for Mac OS X, and I also want to be able to sync click-wheel iPods.

Is there an API or should I read and write directly to the USB port?

Can anyone help me? Thanks

Apple jealously guards sync capability and doesn't provide an API. As far as I know you can't even use iTunes automation to make it do the syncing for you.

Ever-resourceful, the open source community has reverse-engineered the protocols and the libimobiledevice project exists to provide a sync library for Linux-based systems. I don't believe the library will build on OSX -- it relies on the Linux USB architecture -- but if you need to write your own sync library, it will provide you with a good starting point to understand the protocol and device workings.