MP3 Players

[John Vetterli]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Colin McGregor wrote:
> The VAST majority of USB MP3 players are seen as USB
> external drives to Linux. The magic question to ask
> the sales munchkins is "Do I need a driver program to
> make this work with Windows 2000?". There was
> strangeness with Windows 98 and external USB drives,
> so if there is a Windows 98 driver disk, no problem.
> If no driver is required for Windows 2000 you know the
> device will look/act just like an external memory key
> or external hard drive. The reverse is obvious, if a
> driver disk is required for use with Windows 2000 (and
> there are a small number of such devices out there),
> run, don't walk away.

Microsoft has come out with their own "Media Transfer Protocol". 
Since I suspect that a) many Mp3 players manufactured nowadays
will use this protocol instead of USB mass storage, and
b) Windows 2000 supports this protocol out of the box, I'm not
so sure that the lack of a win2000 driver means that the player
is linux-friendly.

Wikipedia entry for Media Transfer Protocol:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

JV
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