iRiver H10
I've picked up an iRiver H10. It isn't as good as the full-featured H3xx players, but it's cheaper and physically smaller too.
It works under Linux fine, in the sense that I can transfer files to and from it, and browse and play them.
However the 'sort by artist or album or genre' bits need you to sync a DB up to iRiver+, a piece of Windows software.
I have managed to reverse engineer the DB file format on the device though - wasn't too hard.
It consists of one big file that contains all the files and their metadata, and then a bunch of index files (one for each of artist, title, genre, etc) which then contains a list of offsets into the main big file. I've worked out where the fields go, and the amount of binary data on either side of the UTF-16 encoded strings, and some of the binary data (eg. track number).
I have a perl module to process the files - however it's currently read-only, as when saving these files you have to calculate a CRC or something, and I haven't worked out how to generate it. Poo. Still, early days yet, and I do have other work to be doing.
Other than that, it plays music fine! Also has a radio tuner, and you can record off that to MP3, including via a timer.. If only I had this when the hitchhikers guide was on the radio.
Apparently you can put cover art and lyrics and stuff onto the thing too, but I don't know how. Maybe I should look at the iRiver+ software that came with it more? Nah ;)
It works under Linux fine, in the sense that I can transfer files to and from it, and browse and play them.
However the 'sort by artist or album or genre' bits need you to sync a DB up to iRiver+, a piece of Windows software.
I have managed to reverse engineer the DB file format on the device though - wasn't too hard.
It consists of one big file that contains all the files and their metadata, and then a bunch of index files (one for each of artist, title, genre, etc) which then contains a list of offsets into the main big file. I've worked out where the fields go, and the amount of binary data on either side of the UTF-16 encoded strings, and some of the binary data (eg. track number).
I have a perl module to process the files - however it's currently read-only, as when saving these files you have to calculate a CRC or something, and I haven't worked out how to generate it. Poo. Still, early days yet, and I do have other work to be doing.
Other than that, it plays music fine! Also has a radio tuner, and you can record off that to MP3, including via a timer.. If only I had this when the hitchhikers guide was on the radio.
Apparently you can put cover art and lyrics and stuff onto the thing too, but I don't know how. Maybe I should look at the iRiver+ software that came with it more? Nah ;)