hi, I have been using centos-5.1 for a few months to wean myself off windows. anyway today I just purchased this device http://www.tascam.com/products/mp-gt1.html

it is a tascam guitar trainer that lets you play guitar into the device with a headphone while listening to mp3's. anyway I guess its kind of like an ipod which I know nothing about. so the basic procedure as per the manual is to plug in the device via usb to the computer and then drag mp3's into the music folder. well I plug in and do a fdisk -l, and I see the device (/dev/sdb1) and I can mount it and see the folders tascam said should be there. so my quuestions are twofold...

1) what can I use on linux to convert the files I will be pulling off cd's to mp3's???

2) since the tascam is formatted fat16 and obviously linux is not...does that mean I cannot or should not use centos for this??? in other words am I stuck on (argg) windows?

thank you.

What format are these files you need to convert to .mp3?

Linux can read all FAT filesystems ... no problem.

Sound Juicer (http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer) is a fair enough tool for ripping CDs and converting them to MP3 as well as OGG, FLAC, WAV and SPEEX formats.

I found Sound Juicer a jerk to get working. MP3 was hard to set up on it.

I just used RipperX. It uses LAME with an easy direct-mp3 ripping setting. It should work well for you.

One could also just use cdparanoia and lame (for example) to do the job; cdparanoia to extract the audio from cd to wav files on disk, and then lame to turn those wav files into mp3. There are other programs of course, but those two I use when I need (rarely nowadays, I just use cd players).

extracts the whole disk, putting each track into a separate file.

and that's it. Of course there are various options to tune if you like..and to get it handy, you can write a small script around these two to have the procedure automated and maybe more.

Of course not everyone loves the command line way but that works even if you don't have a graphical user interface, and it doesn't ask you to configure anything.

i cant rember if centOS is gnome or kde based but kaudiocentre is an easy to use ripper

then when you have the, mp3s just drag and drop...

linux has no problems with FAT16 or FAT32