Hello everybody.

I have a Sony NW-E55 Mp3 player and I would like to know if is there a program I can install on my SuSE 9.3+KDE to transfer songs to and from the player. I know there are gtkpod and kio_ipodslave,but they seem to work with Apple iPods only! I also know about the project Gnomad2 but at the moment it's available for Creative players only.

I thank in advance anyone who can help me.
Best wishes,
Giorgio

When you use it under windows, do you need to use Sony software (i.e. Connect or Sonic Stage) or can you just copy your files over to it through Windows Explorer?

My guess is that with a Sony device, it won't be considered as an USB Mass Storage device, and that therefore proprietary drivers will be needed to copy music to/from the device.

For your sake I hope that I'm wrong, but I think that Sony will have made this device to be Windows only - just like there MiniDisc player/recorders.

daniel

Hi and thanks for your reply.

When I connect the player via usb, it is detected as a usb-device and I can browse it with konqueror. But songs stored in it are not in mp3 format, but have another extension; so if I drag and drop mp3 files to the player in this way, then I won't be able to listen them with the player. I think a software is needed to upload it correctly to the device (on Windows I use SonicStage). On another forum (suseforums.net) someone suggested the program "ylink" and its GUI "pylink", so I'm searching them to download and try. Do you think those programs could be a solution to my problem?

Thank you.
Regards,
Giorgio

I was wondering if the new hd mp3 players from sony would work under linux. As for your question, I think the sony software simply changed your mp3 to atrac3 files. I don't know if you can just copy atrac3 files over to it under a file manager. I think there is a codec for atrac3 to encode files. Let me know of the results.

The ffmpeg package can convert to the ac3 format (atrac3). I've just bought an NW-E405 mp3 player, and I'm having the same problem. It's recognised as a mass storage device. I can drag and drop mp3's to it, but they wont show up on the play list.

However the device does support mp3s natively, so sonicstage is not performing a conversion here. I can only guess that it is either adding something to the ID3 tags to make them 'eligible' for the playlist, or it is modifying data somewhere beyond the scope of the mass storage area.

I will try the ylink software. Maybe if we put enough heads together we can get this working.

Sorry to dig that one but still up to date..
I bought myself a brand new mp3 HD3 walkman sony and I am so impressed how light and small but big (20Go) it is.

Only thing..proprietary SW that sucks.

I feel ashamed I bought and encouraged such a principle what I tried to avoid with Ipod i got here...f**ck me!!

So..here is the issue:

1./ you GOT to use windows to use their sonicstage SW in order to put mp3 on it and transform them in ac3. So forget about linux?

2./ I can see it as a mass storage inlinux but putting mp3 natively won't make them visible from the walkman browser, right?

These are more small tests and I 'd love to have somebody proving I am wrong..

It has been mentioned here that one could encode an MP3 file to an AC3 file with the ffmpeg package.
Can anyone here give a short how-to on how to do that?

Someone else mentioned the ylink program. Is it the CLI linux application for yampp?
(yet another mp3 player) - http://uazu.net/yampp/ ?

My observations:
I have a Dell X300 laptop running debian Sarge and I have the Sony NW-MS7 digital audio player.
I was able to mount it from /dev/sda1 after hooking it up to my USB port. I could see 2 directories "control" and "hifi".

The "hifi" dir contained the songs having an *.msa extension to their name. Catting such a file reveals the name of the song on the first line (therefor I assume those are the songs).
Music files (songs) in the "hifi" dir are named "a3d00001.msa" where the number is counted up in a hexadecimal way: 00001 => 0000f, 00010 => 0001f
There are also 2 *.msf file in this dir: "mgcrl.msf" and "pblist.msf".
"$ strings ./mgcrl.msf" resulted in:
CRLF
---
I don't really know what this file does.
"$ strings ./pblist.msf" resulted in:
TL-0
Friday
TL-0
---
In this file the name of the album is stored (Friday; also displayed on the LCD). I'm able to change the album name to another one with as many characters as Friday (if not then the device displays file error.) When changed to 'Nowday" it worked without a problem. I think this file pblist.msf tells the player where the files are located or something like that.


There is also a name.msf file in the "control" dir.
"$ strings ./name.msf" resulted in:
NM-0
Michael
Michael
C:\PROGRAM FILES\SONY\OPENMG JUKEBOX\MEMSTICK.DLL
E:\CONTROL\NAME.MSF
E:\CONTROL\
---
So it contains a reference to my username (of my previous win 98 laptop), the location of the DLL on that previous laptop and a reference to itself (name.msf) on the location where it was found when mounted to the old win 98 laptop (on E:\).

In the root of the memory-stick there was a zero byte file named "memstick.ind". I don't know what that files' purpose is.

I'm also really interested in using this player with linux so that I can just encode my MP3s to AC3, mount the device, put the AC3 files on it and run a script to adjust the pblist.msf file and listen to them.

Michael :-D

ffmpeg -i inputfile.mp3 -ab 224 -ar 48000 -ac 2 -acodec ac3 outputfile.ac3
(adjust bitrate, samplerate, and number of channels to taste)

However, ac3 is a Dolby format and nothing to do with Sony's atrac3. As far as I can tell, Linux can make use of atrac3 via atrac3.acm in the mplayer win32 codec pack but I don't know if it is possible to invoke mencoder to encode in that format.