Downloading CD Music onto a Sandisk Sansa M240 MP3 player
 

Being that I'm a Linux NOOB and coming from the Windows environment I need to know how to rip music off the music cd's save them onto the hard drive and download them into this player "Linux Debian" style.

I've tried with Amarok and either I don't know something or whatnot, it just isn't working.

I have gone through using Google and for me to no help.

So if someone can direct me on what to do I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks so much!

I've always used GRip, it has a nice graphical interface and handles "various artist" cds better than any other ripper I've seen. It can encode using lame, ogg or just about any other encoder you can think of as well.
http://nostatic.org/grip/

First you have to record the tracks from the CD onto the hard drive in native wav format, then convert it to mp3. I did a google search using "Converting wav to mp3 in Linux" for keywords, there were many links produced. In Windows, I would use musicmatch which does this in one step, it appears in Linux, you need to use a few utilities to achieve this. Do a google search using those keywords and read through them to see what direction you would prefer to take as it appears you're going to have to install applications you may not have, like mplayer to record the tracks, lame should already be installed if you have Amarok.

I should say that GRip is just for getting the tracks on to the computer and encoded, you'll have to use other means to get the songs on the mp3 player. The Sandisk section of the HCL is pretty sparse:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/showcat.php/cat/496

However both of the entries there suggest that it's likely detected as a USB mass storage device, so you should be able to plug it in and use whatever file transfer utility you like to copy the tracks over. I tend to use Midnight Commander for that.

grip and mount :)
 

i'll toss my 2cents and say grip is pretty good for grabbing the tracks off the cd and converting them to mp3's, as well as encoding the cddb info so that your player (if it supports it at least) can display the artist/track/title. I don't have your model, but i do have a sandisk sansa c150 mp3 player, so i can't imagine its too drastically different. Basically you'll want to mount the disk as a usb device and just copy the files over (when you graduate from your self-titled noob status, look into the sync command also - your basically writing the files to a memory buffer, which is then dumped onto the disk, so depending on the size of each file there may actually be some time involved vs the traditional usb disk setup where you just pop and go). i never had any luck getting amarok to recognize the device as an mp3 player, but i didn't play with it too hard either. as far as actually mounting the disk, it mounts as a vfat file system type iirc (i have my fstab set to auto, so i don't remember specifically), but i bring it up in case your kernel was self-built, you'll need to be sure to include support for vfat (if it was built by your distro, its probably got all of the filesystem formats you might want already enabled). hope that helps :)

Hello,

Im using K3B 1.0.1 burner for ripping my music CD's to MP3's. Works fine for me, has CDDB for retrieving track names etc.
It's also the best CD/DVD-burning software for Linux.

If you didnt get the transfers work yet maybe you want check this link also.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1327204

Hope you get it working! =)

I've used grip and tagtool (to fix up the mp3 tags) with my sansa m240. To load files from linux, switch the sansa's settings to msc from mtp so linux will recognize it as a file system. But be aware that if you have things loaded under windows/mtp and you change or delete any of those, the sansa database gets very confused. Also note that the sansa organizes by mp3 tag, not filename or folder location - it doesn't matter where you put something on the player, if the tag has an album name, you will find it on the player under that album. More info here with other useful links at the bottom - especially the anything but IPOD forum.

This represents about a month of confusion and frustration!

I used both Grip and KAudioCreator. Both work great. These tools basically provide a Front End to tools such as readcd, lame, oggenc, etc. K3B works good too ;).

Sansa M230
 

I use k3b to rip CD's.The settings on the Sansa MP3 player must be changed to Menu>settings>USB>MSC otherwise it will default to using Winblows Media Player with all it's nefarious DRM schemes and you will not be able to see the directory Audible,which is where you need to put the MP3 files.

I have this exact same model and here's how I do it:


(1) I rip the tracks from the CD using K3B (I'm using KDE).

(2) I open each mp3 file using a tag editor (such as Kid3, you can find it at http://freshmeat.net/), and I complete the IDv2.3 tags. This is important because the Sandisk mp3 player only seems to recognize the songs if the ID3v2.3 tags are completed; if they are not then the song will be on your mp3 player, but you won't be able to see it. Trust me on that one.

(3) If you are using the Sandisk for the first time then go to the mp3 player's menu and format it. The songs may not transfer successfully if you don't.

(4) Like someone here already said, the mp3 player stores it's data in vfat format, so now all you have to do is copy the songs over to the "music" folder in the mp3 player. WARNING: it seems that once you plug the player into the USB port it takes a little while for the OS to realize it's there, maybe a couple of minutes, so you have to be patient (at least, that's what happens to me. Maybe yours might be quicker?)


This may not be the most elegant solution but it does work, it's dirt-simple, and there's no need to use Amarok to sync the player. I do it all the time.

One other thing to point out is to make sure to unmount the USB device prior to removing it from the system. Failure to do so could corrupt the files on the device.

Nowadays, if it's automatically detected, you'll have an icon on the desktop representing the device. If so, just right click the icon and select "safely remove" or "eject"... Wait for the device icon to dissapear from the desktop, and then remove the device. This will ensure that the device is synced with the system prior to removal.

/Les