I finally found an mp3 player that was low cost, and suits my needs perfectly, as I dont need to bumble about with windows at all. This was the NEX IIe by Frontier Labs. I made the order and finally received it yesterday where I ended up spending most of the day trying to get it to work as I am still fairly new to the linux community (since May) and I needed to hash out getting all the proper modules set right. To do this I made use of a few threads and other bits of info I found poking around the internet as it seems at least a few other linux users saw the benefit of a non-proprietary mp3 player
(I had URLs but apparently I can't post them yet, only meant them to help explain my situation, if you would like them I can send them to you otherwise)
A few kernel recompiles and a switch to another set of sources later (gaming -> ol' gentoo, gaming just didnt want to recompile anymore), I finally got it to work. 'dmesg' showed that the USB connected block device (the compact flash card in the MP3 player) was there. So I then proceeded to mv one song onto it to see if it would work correctly.
Immediate problems insued. First of all, it gave me a message in terminal that it was unable to preserve permissions (did this as user and as root), and brought up the prompt again as though it did nothing, though I assume it was doing something, because about 5 seconds later, my entire system froze and along with it, the NEX IIe. I had to physically restart the system and physically remove the batteries out of the NEX IIe to turn it off. Since then I have been unable to interface the device in any machine at all as none seem to recognize that anything is plugged into the USB.
However, the rest of the player's functions seem perfectly intact. It detects that I was at least trying to put a file on it and all other settings seem to work (well ones I can actually observe without actually playing a song) as well as the ability for it to draw power from both the ac adapter cable interface and the usb cable interface. My first thought was that I screwed something up being the somewhat of a newbie that I am... that perhaps mounting the device as vfat wasn't enough since I had read in the Frontier Labs' FAQ that it should NOT be mounted in FAT32 (Windows default) but in FAT, which, of course, is what vfat is, silly me. In looking for an answer I came across this series of threads in the Linux Mailing list from November 2002 and a couple posts after as well (yes I have it plugged directly into the box and not through a separate hub as I understand from some other people that there have been issues getting it to work through hubs).
Unfortunatly, they helped me little more than to confirm the notion that if Im going to ever get to get this to work at all ever I'm just going to have to bust out my Sandisk Dual CF/SD card reader that I bought last year from ThinkGeek.com which is sitting back home to put songs onto the card and the card into the player :P It'll be only slightly inconvenient, but at least I know this reader actually works (support built into the gentoo sources kernel).
That is, unless anyone has any idea what else I might do to remedy this issue. I'd try recompiling or using other sources but if it was really the kernel that got screwed up SOMEHOW, that wouldn't explain why it wouldn't register on windows systems.
Thanks ahead of time if anyone has any helpful, or at least humorous, input. I am frustrated about this (been wanting to order it since I found it mid-June online) but not enough to let it get me toooo down.
Oh yeah, in case you didn't know, you can find out about it at their homepage FrontierLabs.com and I ordered mine for a good price (no flash card cause I had one from a previously owned player, the original RCA Lyra.... blech they really screwed up on that one with only Real Jukebox support) at digitalworld.tv (hope that doesn't count as selling something!
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