[vox-tech] portable mp3 player in linux

[David Hummel]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 01:02:00PM -0800, Jennifer Stickel wrote:
>
> I am considering getting a portable mp3 player.  I was wondering if
> anyone had suggestions on ones that work nicely in Linux.  Also what
> is the opinion on the flash memory based devices versus the hard drive
> based ones?

I wanted a Linux-friendly player with a large capacity.  After somewhat
extensive research, I ended up getting an iRiver H140 hard drive (40GB)
player for the following reasons (in order of importance):

 * USB 2.0/1.1 standard mass storage device (FAT32 file system)
 * Ogg Vorbis support
 * No digital rights management and/or copy protection
 * On-board firmware upgrade
 * WAV support
 * Record to WAV or MP3
 * SPDIF optical and line I/O
 ... and not so important, but cool:
 * Built-in mic for voice recording
 * FM Tuner
 * Fully functional remote with backlit LCD

You'll definitely want to take advantage of USB 2.0, which means you'll
need a USB 2.0 controller and a kernel > 2.4.20 (IIRC).  My laptop is
USB 1.1, so I purchased an Adaptec USB 2.0 Cardbus adapter (any adapter
with the NEC chipset should work), and the transfers are around 10x
faster than the onboard USB.

The only software you need is the program to create the binary music
info database.  But there's an open source program that compiles on
Linux (iripdb: http://www.marevalo.net/iRipDB/) that will create the
database file from ID3 tags and Ogg info (the Windoze program doesn't
index Ogg info).  This database allows you to search by
artist/album/title/genre (play all songs by this artist, in this genre,
etc.).  I've modified iripdb to fix several problems (broken genre
assignment, incompatibility with older versions of id3lib, etc.).  I
haven't gotten around to submitting the fixes to the author, but I'm
happy to share them.

Basically, this player works on any modern OS with USB and FAT32
support, so you would never have to touch a Windows machine to deal with
this player.  So far it's been great and works perfectly with Linux.  I
believe some of the lower capacity iRiver flash players are also dumb
storage devices with Ogg support, in case this one is overkill for you.

-David