[svlug] Sandisk Sansa and Linux

[Florin Andrei]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> Florin Andrei writes:
>> I bought the c250. [ ... ]
> 
> Does it store its place in a song, not just which song it was
> playing?

Yes.

I paused it about 1:30 into a song, then powered it off.
Upon power up, it came back in the exact same state - I just pushed 
pause/play again and it started to play from that precise moment where 
it was paused.
If you power it down while it's playing, it will come back up paused in 
that place in the song where you happened to shut it down. So it doesn't 
preserve the state fully, but it's close enough.

> Talking to the e130 from Linux is no problem, though: it's standard
> usb-storage. The Sansa's internal flash shows up on sda1 and
> any installed SD card shows up on sdb1.

So the card does show on Linux, and it's a separate device. Nice. That's 
good to know.

> How do you end up making the playlists?

For the Sansa? I don't. I just use fully tagged MP3 files (at least 
these tags: album title, artist, title of song, track number, total 
number of tracks in the album). If you do that, the songs will be 
automatically organized (*) into virtual lists such as Artists, Albums, 
Songs, Genres, etc. When you dive into the lists, it does what you 
expect: e.g. the Albums list will show you the list of all albums; you 
enter an album, it will give you the list of songs properly ordered. And 
so on.
It's a UI metaphor that I'm comfortable with.

The id3tag tool (from the id3lib package) is pretty easy to use and it's 
fully scriptable. The ripped CDs are already tagged, Grip takes care of 
that by default.

$ id3tag --help
id3tag
Usage: id3tag [OPTIONS]... [FILES]...
    -h         --help            Print help and exit
    -V         --version         Print version and exit
    -1         --v1tag           Render only the id3v1 tag (default=off)
    -2         --v2tag           Render only the id3v2 tag (default=off)
    -aSTRING   --artist=STRING   Set the artist information
    -ASTRING   --album=STRING    Set the album title information
    -sSTRING   --song=STRING     Set the title information
    -cSTRING   --comment=STRING  Set the comment information
    -CSTRING   --desc=STRING     Set the comment description
    -ySTRING   --year=STRING     Set the year
    -tSTRING   --track=STRING    Set the track number
    -TSTRING   --total=STRING    Set the total number of tracks
    -gSHORT    --genre=SHORT     Set the genre
    -w         --warning         Turn on warnings (for debugging) 
(default=off)
    -n         --notice          Turn on notices (for debugging) 
(default=off)

Now I regret being an iPod fanboy for such a long time. This thing costs 
much less and has an FM radio, a microphone, and can record from FM and 
from the mic. Plus it's Linux-friendly in a nice scripting way. ;-)

(*) - After you upload / delete / change songs on the player, when you 
disconnect from the PC it will display a progress bar saying it's 
rebuilding ... something, I forgot what exactly. I guess it goes through 
all the files, looking for tags and it (re)builds some kind of database. 
Doesn't take too long.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/