Hi, I am wondering if I can get some assistance. I am having trouble getting my Creative Zen V Plus 4 Gig player working in linux.

Here are my issues:
1. With Amarok, I can connect to the zen by setting it as a mtp device. But after I transfer files the Album and Artist filter on the Zen has many unreadable characters. Also when I reconnect to the device Amarok shows the same crazy characters.

2. So I moved to the command line. mtp sendfile will work, connect and transfer the mp3 files. But my zen will only display the songs in the "All Tracks menu", They are not filtered with Artist or Album. It seems that the Tracks are missing the ID3 Tags??? Also with the mp3's transfered, I cannot fast forward or rewind because the mp3 shows a length of 0. When I look on the details of the file, all the feilds are blank. No Album or Artist. I know that the tags are their when looking with amarok but something happens during the transfer.

3. So then I tried gnomad2, and kzenexplorer, they both report "cannot locate jukebox". I believe this is something to do with my configuration. It does not autodetect the device when I plug it in.

Ideally I would like all to work, but If I could start with the basics and find out why the tags are lost, or misunderstood after the transfer of the mtp-sendfile.

I am running pclinuxos, All the updates but did not move to the 2007 version.
Creative Zen V Plus 4 Gig version 1.11.01
Command to transfer the file: mtp-sendfile X.mp3 -f "Music"

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jodie

I have used Gnomad2 with my wife's V Plus 2 GB without any problems. Amarok did not seem to work nearly as well.

The issue with Gnomad2 not detecting the player is probably because your user is not in the correct group(s) to get access to the device. This is pretty common and I think is even mentioned in their FAQ someplace. The easiest thing to do is just run Gnomad2 as root (that is what I did to make sure it was working), but ideally you should really get the groups setup properly.

Yes, I tried Gnomad2 as root, but still the same message "cannot locate jukebox". I am not sure how mtp devices work, but it does not "autodetect" the device when I plug it in. What I mean is that KDE does not open message box, like when I plug in a usb stick or my camera asking how I would like to handle the device.

So I think it is something to do with my hotplug or automount settings. But I am not sure the steps to verify it is working. I am going to try: mount -t /dev/mtp

OK, cool got it to work.

Recompiled:
libnjb-2.2.5.tar.gz
libmtp-0.1.5.tar.gz
gnomad2-2.8.13.tar.gz

gnomad2 gave me an error during the compile:
[jodie@localhost po]$ make
file=`echo ca | sed 's,.*/,,'`.gmo \
&& rm -f $file && -o $file ca.po
/bin/sh: -o: command not found

So I went into the po directory and commented out a line in the makefile.

.po.gmo:
file=`echo $* | sed 's,.*/,,'`.gmo \
#JODIE && rm -f $$file && $(GMSGFMT) -o $$file $<

The make and make install worked.
I needed to run gnomad2 from where the new binaries were placed as root. (I now have two copies), and I needed to tell where the new library was.

[root@localhost /]# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/
[root@localhost /]# /usr/local/bin/gnomad2

And now I am happy, I can work out the permission details later.

Thanks MS3FGX, for your assistance.

Jodie

Never take (this) easiest route - in this case it's simply stupid you should not run any programs with root permissions that are not absolutely needed. Simply because it a) is a security risk, and because b) you can trash a lot of stuff accidentally that you couldn't as a regular user.

Amarok does not work with the newer Zen players. The older Zens work with it (and without any media application, just by copying files the usual way), but Zen V:s don't. Gnomad2 is by far the only real program I've found that does work with Zen V:s. On many distributions the binary versions available on their reposities are compiled, however, in such a way that Zen V:s might not work - a recompilation is needed, just like Jodie_ns did, to include the necessary versions of the needed libraries. After this the thing should work all right; if any permission problems are included, they should be mentioned in the README and/or INSTALL files of the source package.

As a sidenote, Amarok can be made to "understand" Zen Vs correctly if I'm right, but it also involves compiling it from the source - and last time I read about it [from the web], it was just a lot easier to use Gnomad2. I can't remember for sure, but am I wrong if I think that you don't even have to compile all of the above packages from source - the libs and gnomad and all? I think only part of them was needed to recompile in order to get Zen Vs work. Note that on many distributions it is easy to compile the source and then create an installable binary file out of that before "make install" step or equivalent, to make the installation, upgrade and removal of the compiled thing a lot easier. This is extremely easy on Ubuntu.

Which is why I said he should be changing his groups to get proper access to the device (if access restriction was the cause of the issue, apparently it was not).

We were not talking about running the application as root full time, only running it as root to verify if the issue was permissions related or not, which is standard operating procedure when troubleshooting hardware under *nix.

As I said, permissions issues are very common with libmtp, and it is suggested that you try and connect as root if you are unable to as a normal user. I thought this was pretty clear, especially since I said:

not

At any rate, the topic creator understood my meaning and the issue is now resolved.

OK made it work for the user, me. I edited the /etc/group, and made me part of the usb group.then added the export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/ to my .bashrc file.

Now it works as a normal user.

Now I am now trying to get it to work with my IBM Thinkpad 600E (PII 300Mhz with 192Meg ram), using Damnsmalllinux.

1. Upgraded to gcc, not the little compiler they had,
2. downloaded and compiled libusb-0.1.12, compiled and installed OK.
3. downloaded and compiled libmtp-0.1.5:
Issues: needed to comment out in config.h after I did the ./configure step.
144 /* Define to rpl_malloc if the replacement function should be used. */
145 //#define malloc rpl_malloc
Then needed to type LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/
Then it compiled and installed fine.

Result: I can now type mtp-detect and it found my Creative zen V plus.

I am in the process of trying to install gnomad2:

SO I downloaded

1. glib-2.12.13
2. gettext-0.16
3. gnomad2-2.8.13

I am now in the process of compiling gettext
my problem is now:
gcc -shared .libs/bindtextdom.o .libs/dcgettext.o .libs/dgettext.o .libs/gettext.o .libs/finddomain.o .libs/hash-string.o .libs/loadmsgcat.o .libs/localealias.o .libs/textdomain.o .libs/l10nflist.o .libs/explodename.o .libs/dcigettext.o .libs/dcngettext.o .libs/dngettext.o .libs/ngettext.o .libs/plural.o .libs/plural-exp.o .libs/localcharset.o .libs/lock.o .libs/relocatable.o .libs/langprefs.o .libs/localename.o .libs/log.o .libs/printf.o .libs/version.o .libs/osdep.o .libs/intl-compat.o -lc -Wl,-soname -Wl,libgnuintl.so.8 -o .libs/libgnuintl.so.8.0.1
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [libgnuintl.la] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/dsl/dnld/gettext-0.16/gettext-tools/intl'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dsl/dnld/gettext-0.16/gettext-tools'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dsl/dnld/gettext-0.16/gettext-tools'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

I will try later, if anyone know what this might be let me know.

Thanks
Jodie