IBM “Jukebox”
I’ve spent the weekend cleaning up a failed upgrade on that old IBM laptop that I’m using for the kids’ mp3 players. The players are Sansa e250s
from Sandisk. With the exception of Sandisk’s preference to completely ignore my question regarding Linux support, customer service has been completely responsive. I managed to brick out the player that I was trying to upgrade and I was able to return the player with the only hassle being that someone dropped the ball and my return paperwork was slower than it’s supposed to be. If they had instructions on upgrading using Linux, I might not have had to return the previous player. Their software is built around Windows XP though, so getting this company to move on this is a Don Quixote move. I am able to use Amarok to manage the music lists and edit tags in the mp3 files. Sadly, so far, it does not appear to be able to actually write the mp3s themselves so I continue to use lame from a script to create the files. The other mildly annoying behavior is that the Sansa e250 doesn’t seem to allow changing ownership of the files on it so Amarok has to be run from either root or a sudo command.
For those interested in hooking up this player make sure to set your USB mode to MSC. The laptop has hotplug and automount running so that all I have to do is plug the thing in. The settings in Amarok allow me to set it as a Generic Player and set a mount point. Clicking the connect icon in the Devices menu brings up the player and allows copying files from the laptop to player and vice versa. So far, I have not found where Amarok allows one to create mp3s - or any other sound file - that can then be copied to the player. Instead Amarok appears to be a feature rich sound file manager. I haven’t tried to hook up any other players to this machine, but so far it seems to work quite well for copying files between the “Generic” Sansa and the hard drive.
