SanDisk mp3 player not seen

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Chris F.A. Johnson <chris-E7bvbYbpR6jSUeElwK9/Pw at public.gmane.org>

|    It's a 1GB SanDisk Clip: <http://cfajohnson.com/testing/SanDisk.jpg>.
| 
|    I followed the instructions at
|    <http://www.howtoforge.com/sandisk_mp3_player_linux>, but nothing
|    works.

Those instructions are for the e200 series.  You have a Sansa Clip of
some kind (there are several versions, the current being the Clip+).

Judging from the fact that rockbox has stable ports for the e200
series and unstable ones for the Clip v2 and Clip+, they are surely
different in guts.  <http://www.rockbox.org/>

That does not mean that the Linux support is different, but it means
that it could be.

There are two "standard" protocols for USB Digital Audio Players: UMS
(USB Mass Storage -- looks like flash memory; well supported) aka MSC
(usb Mass Storage Class) and MTP (Microsoft's favoured Media Transport
Protocol <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol>).

MTP support does exist in Linux.  My understanding is that various
manufacturers implement it a little differently so there are some
device-dependent fiddles.

Your version of the Clip may or may not let you configure which you
are using.  The instructions pointed at (for the e250) tell you to
switch it to "MSC".

MTP is supported in current Linux, but it has been improving over the
last few years.  So you should be using a non-ancient distro if you
want good luck with MTP devices.  If that sounds like superstition,
that's because it is: I don't know the cold hard facts.

So: before I go too much further, I should know if MTP is an issue
here.  Do you know if your clip can be set to be UMS?  If so, that is
the easiest approach.

MTP may be more suited to DAP uses.  I don't understand it, but it
seems to have a model of files as having artists, titles, albums,
covers, etc. that matches commercial music.  MSC just has a filesystem
hierarchy (which I'm more comfortable with) and some convention(s)
for encoding playlists in a file.

Programs such as Amorok and Gnomad2 understand MTP, with the aid of
libraries (libmtp in particular).  I don't know if MTP devices can
appear as mounted filesystems.
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