IPod support question

I have been using RhythmBox to manage my iPod for several years, and 
basically like the way it works. When I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 about a 
year ago, Rhythmbox started behaving strangely and it continues to work 
wrong still. I am getting tired of it, and want to know what I can do to 
get it to work correctly.

There seem to be two basic problems and I don't know if they are related 
or not. I have tested this on two different iPods and the behavior is 
the same.

1) I cannot delete anything from the iPod using Rhythmbox. If I try to 
delete anything, (songs, files, playlists, or playlist entires,) the 
program hangs and will eventually crash. Every time. I can rename 
things, I can create playlists, I can load songs onto the device, but I 
cannot remove them. (I can use other programs, and they all seem to 
support deleting. But they suck in other ways.)

2) Every time I connect the device and start Rhytmbox, or start it and 
then connect the device, every single playlist is duplicated. That is, 
every song in the playlist is added an additional time to that playlist. 
This happens for every playlist every time. The actual data files for 
the song are not duplicated, just the reference to the song in the 
playlist. The duplication is not seen in Rhythmbox, but is seen on the 
device when it is operating unconnected. Also, other programs see the 
duplication.

These problems have persisted for at least a year, and have not been 
fixed by any updates. The program did not used to work this way.

It is possible that this is a configuration issue, but I have not been 
able to find a way to fix it. Is this problem seen by anyone else? Is 
there a way to fix it? Is this a known bug? Is anyone working on it?

-- Will Merrell