MP3 Players

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 09:54:14PM -0500, John Moniz wrote:
> My daughter is hoping for an MP3 player for her birthday. I just checked 
> the Sony line at their store and started losing interest in the Sony 
> products when the salesman insisted I was required to use the Sony PC 
> software to load music to the player (it compresses the songs even 
> further, supposedly). I couldn't get past the point with him that I was 
> not going to use his proprietary software.
> 
> From people's experiences, do any of the USB MP3 players get recognized 
> as a drive in Linux so I can do a simple MP3 file transfer? Are there 
> any players known to be trouble with Linux?

Most generic players are just a usb flash drive with some hardware that
can read a fat filesystem and play MP3s.

Some of the higher end ones are different.  I suspect what sony is using
is ATTRAC or ATTRAC3 enconding (the encoding they invented for the
minidisc).  Certainly many of the sony players have not supported mp3 at
all, until very recently.

I think the ipod you can simply copy files to the drive as a usb flash
drive, but I could be wrong.  It supports aac and mp3 I believe.

Some creative players also require special software to load files onto
them (I think most of theirs support mp3 and wma).

So essentially the more generic and no name the player is, the more
likely it is to just support mp3s and just work as a flash drive you can
copy files to from any OS you want.

Len Sorensen
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