[Gllug] mp3 player

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 13:43, robin.c.smith at bt.com wrote:
> The wife wants an "mp3" player to go jogging with. I'm looking for one that
> I can easily download files from Linux, so criteria:-
> 
> 1. Can connect to Linux - I have to following interfaces: USB,
> Firewire,Serial,Parallel and 100 Base T
> 2. Solid state only.
> 3. Upgradeable so that it will be able to play ogg files in the future.
> 
> Any experiences or recommendations.

The Vivanco vmax http://www.hifichoice.co.uk/review_print.asp?ID=455
works with Linux also.

Advantages:-

* Very small and light
* No internal memory, just two MMC slots, so can get it to 128MB easily
* Comes with a USB MMC reader that works woth Linux
* Relatively cheap

Downsides:-

* Upgradability to ogg files is probably not going to happen
* Uses ROS formatted cards, not VFAT, which is a pain.

The ROS format referred to is actually a misnomer - ROS stands for
Record On Silicon in this context, which is the format of SD/MMC
compatible ROMs. The actual format used is the M3C filesystem, which is
fully documented at http://www.pontis.de (go to support/software, then
find the "for SW developers" icon). Pontis provide some command line
tools for manipulating "ROS" files, but they're a bit awkward and you
end up creating them with appropriate songs, then using dd to get them
onto the cards.

That said, the filesystem is documented, and there's nothing in the way
of someone implementing a decent open source util for Linux....

Mike


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