Re: [slightly OT] ipods and other mp3 players

ray wrote:

Having had no experience in the area, I'm thinking of getting an
inexpensive mp3 player - does that appear as and work like an ipod or is
there a significant difference?

You didn't say which player, so it's difficult to say. If you get one that
plugs into the PC's USB port, then it will almost certainly work as a USB
storage device. In other words, it shows up in Linux as an external drive.
For example, I plug my MP3 player into my PC running Mandrive 2007 Free and
it shows up in Konqueror as drive /dev/sdc1 mounted at /mnt/removable. I
can then just drag MP3s onto it.

The cheap ones usually resemble what are known as pen drives (or thumb
drives) and usually act that way too; in other words, you can not only use
them for listening to MP3s but as portable data storage devices.

Also, many of the cheap ones (i.e. the ones without much memory) usually
play the tracks in the order in which they were written to memory - you
don't get to set up playlists, you have to keep pressing the 'go to next
track' button. If you get one of those, it's worth knowing that they will
usually play everything in the first directory they find, followed by
everything in the second directory, and so on. So you can, for example,
change the order in which albums are played by plugging the player into
your PC and renaming the directories to change the order.

For example, you might have these directories for a couple of months:
01-norah_jones-not_too_late
02-nerina_pallot-fires
then, when you want to change the order, you can change them to:
01-nerina_pallot-fires
02-norah_jones-not_too_late
Not as good as having complete control via playlists, but that's what you
get with an inexpensive player.

--
Garry Knight
garryknight@xxxxxxx

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