I\'m thinking of improving my programming skills by making a music player to sync with an iPod/iPhone but there\'s no point in even starting if I can\'t even access the devi
You may want to look at iphoneDisk : http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/
It uses MacFuse, so it's not supported under Lion, but it still works very well under Snow Leopard.
However, you may not be able to access everything on your iPhone, but you can at least access recordings, photos and video.
iOS devices do not have a mount point because the computer does not treat them as data drives. Instead, data is sent through usbmuxd, which connects directly through USB. There is a library called libimobiledevice which uses the information reverse engineered by the jailbreaking community to allow you to communicate with iDevices (It doesn't require a jailbreak unless you want full filesystem access, the jailbreakers were just the ones motivated to do the reverse engineering). According to their homepage, you will also need libgpod to sync music/videos.
If when you say "iPod" you mean non-iOS iPods and not the iPod touch, then they are mounted as normal hard drives. They will show up on your desktop if you use disk mode or turn on the option in iTunes, and can be accessed through the command line otherwise.
I answered a similar question for an iPhone. I'm sure it would also work for an iPod (although untested).. the concept is the same, as it's an Apple USB device.
answer: use ifuse
https://superuser.com/a/1135668/653172
If you like paying for things.. you could probably checkout iExplorer.