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?"

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5G iPod Stinks, Too

[TheNinjaroach]

5G iPod support stinks for me in Linux as well. I love my ability to rip any MP3s from an iPod with KDE by typing "ipod:/" and having everything sorted nicely. On the other hand, synching is terribly broken. Last night I tried using both the ipod:/ kioslave AND Amarok (which probably uses the ipod kioslave) with mostly poor results. 16GB of music was copied to my device, but only 350 of my 2500 songs "registered" on the iPod. The rest were in the appropriate folders, but the iPod stated 15GB of its data were "Other" files and could not play them.

I have finally reached the point where I regret buying my iPod Video. I loved my old 30GB Photo but iTunes has become more bloated and buggy instead of getting better like I always thought it would. They've obscured the internal iPod library beyond usability, I really wish my player appeared as a "USB Mass Storage" device and simply played the files I dropped to it.

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/ [listen-project.org]

Re:What do you use?

[Swizec]

I keep amarok running all the time on my 1.8GHz AMD with a gig of RAM and there are never any problems with it. The CPU usage is decently low, usually at around 2% and RAM is usually used up to about 150MB when I'm not doing anything. That may be a bit high but my amarok playlist is quite large and there are usually around 100 processess running even when I'm not doing anything.

Bottom line is, amarok beats everything in usability. As for syncing, I just use all my players as a mass storage device and do away with any weird problems.

Re:What do you use?

[drew]

I wasn't too impressed with amarok last time I tried it. Besides being a slower, uglier clone of an already slow and ugly application, it would downright refuse to play about half of my files, despite them being a type that was supported by the backend that I was using. I spend a while poking around in the code, and basically, amarok would drop any file that it couldn't figure out how to parse the tags for. I brought it up on the forums, and one of the developers asked what I thought the expected behavior should be when I asked it to play a file that it couldn't read the metainfo for. Hello?!? The expected behavior when I ask it to play a file would be to play the file! I don't load up an audio file in my music player to find out who the singer is, I load an audio file in a music player to listen to it.

Maybe it has improved drastically since then (this would have been a little over 6 months ago, I suppose), but the whole experience left a really bad taste. These days I mostly use xfmedia, which is small, clean, and uses the xine backend, so it can play just about anything (works better than anything I've tried so far on windows, anyway). It doesn't support syncing that I am aware of, but I sync my iPod to my work computer, so I really don't care too much about that.

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. :)