Tuesday, 06 January 2009

I received a SanDisk Sansa e260 (v2) for my birthday. It was one of those presents that acquired for myself on behalf of someone else because it worked out easier that way. I bought it for cheap from Woot!

I thought I'd use it to play podcasts while I'm at the gym. We've been listening to NPR for a while now, and there's lots of excellent programming, and it's all available in download for as well. Since I don't spend all that much time in the car, I'm not listening to much of it.

The first mission was to upgrade the firmware. Getting the player into MSC (instead of MTP) mode with the original firmware was a little tricky, but I got there in the end. Then I had to locate the firmware in a Linux-installable format. I think I ended up resorted to using Windows, but I later found the raw firmware image without needing an installer.

I'm using Rhythmbox at the moment to download the podcasts. I thought I'd try out its MTP support, just because it actually had it, but either Linux 2.6.26 has a problem with MTP, or the player is particularly flaky doing it with Linux, because I just seemed to get a pile of USB errors when connecting the device in this mode, so I'm sticking with MSC for now.

Oh, and I had to put a .is_audio_player file in the root of the device to make it show up in Rhythmbox. I later discovered that it worked most optimally if I put

audio_folders=MUSIC/
folder_depth=2

in the file.

I'm still trying to come up with an optimal way of managing the audio I want to listen to. It seems somewhat tedious to drag and drop all of the podcasts from Rhythmbox to the device. I kind of want some sort of plug and play auto-sync method. It seems I can't use a connection-triggered rsync, because some of the podcasts seem to get downloaded with non-FAT-filesystem-friendly filenames. Rhythmbox seems to take care of this by doing some sort of automagical renaming at transfer time. That said, not everything is showing up in the music list with sane names. There's a few things that have an unknown artist I think. That may be a deficiency in the ID3 tags of the MP3s themselves though...

What I really want some way of getting home, hooking up the player and just getting what's new, without expending too much effort (at the time of hooking up the player, anyway. I'm happy to expend some effort getting to that point)

The next weird thing is that the device wants to talk USB 1.1. I'm not sure what is at fault here, but I can, allegedly at least, make the device reconnect at USB 2.0 by removing and reloading the ehci-hcd module after connecting it.

Here we have the device initially attached:

apollock@icarus:~$ lsusb -t
Bus#  5
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0002
Bus#  4
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  3
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
  `-Dev#   9 Vendor 0x0781 Product 0x7423
Bus#  2
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
  `-Dev#   6 Vendor 0x413c Product 0x8103
Bus#  1
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001

lsusb says that bus #3 is ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

Then if I do a spot of presto-changeo...

apollock@icarus:~$ sudo modprobe -r ehci-hcd
apollock@icarus:~$ sudo modprobe ehci-hcd
apollock@icarus:~$ lsusb -t
Bus#  5
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0002
  `-Dev#   3 Vendor 0x0781 Product 0x7423
Bus#  4
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  3
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
Bus#  2
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001
  `-Dev#   7 Vendor 0x413c Product 0x8103
Bus#  1
`-Dev#   1 Vendor 0x1d6b Product 0x0001

Bam! It's moved over to bus #5, which lsusb says is 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Weird.

I wonder if I should try running Rockbox on it? Seems not, it's only for v1 players. Oh well.