Syncing Music Players In Linux?

Daengbo writes "I recently sold my old laptop to a friend, and she asked me to keep Ubuntu on it rather than installing Windows for her. To help her with the transition, I wrote two intro lessons for her, but we've hit a stumbling block. The iRivier Clix (4GB) she's been using syncs with Windows Media Player. My research shows that the model has both an MTP for the sync and a UMS mode which acts as a mass storage device. Rhythmbox's 'Scan Removable Media' doesn't pick up anything from the USB mass storage device, and although Syncropated claims to support these types of devices, it doesn't find any supported devices. Unless you use an iPod, this appears to be a real weak point in the Linux desktop. Do you sync your mass storage devices and music players? What do you use?"

Comments

Amarok again

[Apreche]

I don't use KDE, but I use Amarok. Honestly, it is the only media player on Linux worth anything. Banshee and others look fine at first, but you will realize they are unstable pieces of junk if you try to add more than 50 songs to the library. Also, if you use an iPod, you can get it to work with Amarok or other Linux apps quite easily. However, the experience will never be as smooth as iTunes. This is a serious problem. This is why even though I run Linux on all my machines, I still use an iPod with a Mac mini for podcast listening. There simply isn't any other solution that works as smoothly.

Re:What do you use?

[BecomingLumberg]

Listen is a good Amarok clone that is GTK (and a believe less of a resource hog). http://www.listen-project.org/

Re:What do you use?

[numbski]

Amarok is good, but I think he's overlooking the obvious here (well...obvious to anyone who's worked with UMS devices at all....)

What's happening with his player is that it is either - 1, not recognized by the OS as a UMS (doesn't sound like this...he's able to put files on it and mount it, etc), or 2, the application doesn't recognize the device. If the latter, then what he needs to do is get the USB Vendor ID and Product ID of the player, and send it to the devs so that they can add support for it. If he doesn't mind recompiling from source, he can probably locate the file where the USB identifiers are kept, add them locally, and recompile.

That said, there are a bunch of devices out there that misrepresent themselves as UMS, but in reality are not. I had a camera like this. It took SmartMedia flash, and had a USB cable that was suppose to allow me to plug the camera in and use it as a card reader. Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX immediately attempted to load the UMS driver, as the device claimed this, but then failed miserably. The camera came with a driver disk for Windows, which should have tipped me off right away what was happening. Essentially whomever wrote the firmware for the camera had it identify with that class, even though it wasn't true. It triggers the OS to load the wrong driver, and somehow they worked around that for the Windows driver. If he has that going on, he's pretty much SOL. If he can mount the player and copy files, it's just a matter of getting those two ID's into the hands of the developers, and temporarily modifying his own build until the next version comes out.

This is why Open Source stuff is cool. Your device isn't supported, but is standards compliant? Add it to the sources and recompile. :)