I Me a River 8

In my quest for a media player that supports OGG (the open source audio format) because some of my favorite podcasts no longer do mp3, I finally settled on an iRiver E200 from JR’s via Amazon. I stuck it in my shopping cart at Amazon to think about for a couple of days and, in that period, the price went down 25%.

I have it working under Linux. Here’s how.

I jacked it into the computer using the accompanying USB cable and ran dmesg.

Nothing.

The computer was not seeing it.

After trying a couple of other things, I fell back on the linux geek’s favorite tech support site: Google.

I had to nose about for a search string that excluded pages and pages of product reviews, but, after five minutes or so of messing with the search terms, I discovered this page, which clearly and simply explained how to fix the problem:

The device defaults to a USB communications protocol called “MFT,” which works with Windows (hoick! ptui!) media player. The fix was to go into the device’s settings and change the communications protocol to “MSC(UMS)” (No, I don’t know what the acronyms stand for) and reformat the player’s file system.

I jacked it back into the computer and it showed up as a SCSI drive called “sdd.” So I created a mount point in the media directory and threw the iRiver into my fstab:

/dev/sdd   /media/iriver   auto   noauto,user   0   0

(“Noauto” means the device will not mount automatically. I do it that way because it gives me more control. I must use the “mount” command. Trivia: The “mount” command dates from when mounting a drive meant lifting–mounting–a big-ass reel of tape to a spindle and threading the tape through a tape head.)

I opened a terminal and mounted the device:

mount /media/iriver

navigated to it:

cd /media/iriver

and verified that I was seeing it with a dir command, which returned the following:

bash-3.1$ dir
E100.sys Music Pictures Playlists Recordings System Text Video did.bin tuner.dat

Of course, were I not a command-line kind of guy, I could have, after mounting the device, looked at it with the Konqueror file manager:

I copied a podcast to the Music directory and tested it. It played. I turned on the FM radio and it played. I recorded a voice memo and it played.

I can copy files to the device using a simple “copy” command. I can delete files using a simple “remove” command. I could also use the file manager to do all this stuff, but why wait for it to load? The command line is always quicker.

All in all, it rocks.

The whole process took less than 30 minutes and did not require installing any software, just a little messing about with /etc/fstab.

Here is the current podcast load: