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

Why Linux won't happen on the desktop

[Animats]

If you've got automount running, UMS devices should just magically appear as storage when plugged in. Works fine in Suse 10.1, anyway. For MTP devices, libmtp [sourceforge.net] works fine. I just got a Samsung YP-T9 and replaced the MTP firmware with UMS firmware by transferring it with mtp-sendfile from libmtp. (There's also mtpfs [adebenham.com] which is supposed to make an MTP device look like a file system. I haven't tried it, it uses FUSE (user-space filesystem) which I haven't got installed at the moment and libmtp did the job.)

On the YP-T9 after transferring, I can play the files directly from the file viewer menu, but I need to run the "update library" to get them to show up under the music menu. (The player also plays Ogg Vorbis files just fine, but the current firmware doesn't seem to recognize Ogg metadata the way it does MP3 metadata. Sigh.) The same seems to be true if I transfer files from Windows in UMS mode.

That's why Linux on the desktop isn't going anywhere. The end user, not the developer, gets stuck with integration. Any questions?

or your reality distortion field

[dedazo]

ROFL, that's certainly not true. Amarok positively blows on my 1.0GHz PIII (Ubuntu). And for some reason it consumes more and more memory over time, never releasing it until closed. There might be some sort of tweak that can be done (maybe the real-time Wikipedia lookups or something) but in the default config it's not very usable.

On a 3.4MHz P4 it's acceptable, but I still see the memory thing.

Re:Oh, if only that were true.

[dedazo]

(some bullshit exaggeration and FUD, etc) Windoze and Office are pigs. They always were and they always will be.

I don't know at what "Fortune 500" you worked, but I see two possibilities here. 1) Your "Fortune 500" friends that forced you to boot daily and all that jazz were complete and utter retarded morons; or 2) You are just lying. Whichever it is, rest assured that your imagined hell on earth is nowhere near the reality I've been accustomed since I started working in this industry many years ago.

As for Amarok working "just fine" on your 486DX2, more power to you. Maybe one day I'll be a Linux expert and be able to tweak my box so it doesn't suck so much, but in the meantime I'll stick to what I know and enjoy. I don't really use Linux enough to care much about whether or not some bloated MP3 player works well on it or not.