I sit in an understaffed corner of a quiet office. Most days I grab bandwidth and listen to my CD collection, ripped and served on the Internet (no, you can't get there). Sometimes this is annoying. There are bandwidth problems (both at the home office, and the office at which I'm working--I've been spoken to because of the GBs of data I'm moving every day...), hiccups between songs as the next one is loaded, loss of the stream with router failures (one of mine is going out and I think the streaming stresses it), or other people jealous that they can't do the same...

I've been toying with the idea of just bringing an MP3 player. I use a Palm Pilot Tungsten/E, which can play songs from an SD card; I've got a 256MB card, but this is a drag because it sucks the battery of the Palm, and with the other programs and data, there's not a lot of room for a lot of songs. I also carry a 1GB USB thumb drive, on which I stored a handful of songs, too. I know the new iPod Shuffle 1GB claims 200+ songs, but they're not including other data either.

My wife has a "regular" iPod. It's pretty slick. Small, quiet, holds 20GB of music, which is 5 more than I've currently ripped... While I'm not cheap, by any means, I get caught up in the fact that I can practically build a PC for the price of one of the iPods (yeah, and then carry that around...), and that you have to use iTunes to store stuff on it. That's not a problem; we have a Mac, too. But I've decided to not like the iTunes software.

I've already ripped my songs. They're already stored on a server's directory. They're shared, and using drive mapping or HTTP, anyone on my network (no, not you) can get there. I got my daughter running LINUX, and using XMMS she can use the whole collection. The Mac can see it, too, and using RealPlayer it just uses the shared directory. But not iTunes. For whatever reason, iTunes had to copy all of the files locally. Maybe it's just me, but the server on which the songs sit, and the network between, is much faster (and bigger) than the Mac mini's little HDD.

I've looked at the bits from Creative; got one for my son, who seemed to like it, but one of the things it did that I didn't like was force you to use its software to move songs. Not a problem for him; he's pretty good at Windows and doesn't like LINUX or the rest (yet, we hope). There's some pretty machines from other people, too, that I've been looking at. Usually I get hung up on some feature that's missing or some extra tie to the OS or something.

One day I got an e-mail from TigerDirect that had a deal for this Entempo Spirit 20 MP3 player. Not intending to buy one, I snooped around and looked at it. It's pretty feature-full. It supports MP3 and WMA (arguably similar quality at 10% of the space--one of the features I liked about the Creative MP3 we gave the boy), has a built-in voice recorder (I forget everything...maybe this can help?), and an FM tuner (I do find myself sitting in the car outside the office sometimes waiting for the bit or song to end) with record and minimal "time shift" capabilities (like Tivo for the radio!). They tout a "better shock resistance" on their web site, which can't be bad, right? And they had their installation and user's manual on the Internet for everyone to see--sweet!

A quick review showed that the device takes no extra drivers. It claims to plug into your USB port and be seen by the OS as a new removable storage--works that way with my thumb drive, too. All of their documentation was specific to Windows, but I've been doing this long enough, and know enough of the tricks...I really wanted to use it on one of my LINUX boxes. With the thumb drive (the only "mass" storage I've plugged into both OSs--everything else is networked) things get copied and deleted and moved and otherwise managed a whole lot faster from LINUX than from Windows.

I got one. The features and flexibility seemed to be what I wanted, and the price at TigerDirect was $40 cheaper than elsewhere on-line, and a full 1/2 off the price listed on Entempo's own site.

When it arrived, I opened the container and plugged the drive in to let it charge over night. The manual says 3 hours, but frankly I wasn't going to sit up and watch a battery charge... My wife think's it's big and bulky. Compared to her iPod, it is. It's about the size of a "normal" 3-1/2" hard drive. The edges are covered with a nice rubber border that matches the control buttons, but otherwise it's unremarkable in its design. Buttons and menus are easy to activate. Good enough.

This morning I sat down to get it working. I figured it'd take a few minutes and then I could start copying the music.

I plugged the sucker in my Suse box, and nothing happened. Suse recognized something was there; the CPU meter spiked for a while, but there was no automatic opening of a file manager window, like there is with my thumb drive. I checked the mount table and opened the device, and found nothing. Hmmm.

I pulled the plug, and happily watched the display on the unit switch back to the main menu (as though powered on again, but whatever), after it prompted me that it was rebuilding the index (probably the automatic routine to make it see your music). All seemed good. Of course, I hadn't copied anything yet, so it did nothing significant.

I plugged it into my Ubuntu box. This was my intended target anyway; not only is the PC much better than the other one, and the USB port easier to reach, but I haven't mucked it up with all of the other software. Note that I started on the Suse, because that's where I do all of the rest of the stuff--rip CDs, play games, etc. Mostly because I haven't moved that to the newer machine yet.

Again, nothing appeared. The Ubuntu box has a 12-in-one media reader, in which are already plugged two "digital film" cards; they were present, so I knew Ubuntu was talking to the reader still. The Entempo switched its display to the USB graphic, so it seemed to like it, but again, nothing on the desktop or mount tables or anywhere else I could see.

I pulled the plug, and the same reverting to normal process occured as when I pulled it from the Suse box.

Then I pondered. Do I reboot the Suse to Windows, and try it that way, or give the Mac a go.

I decided to give the Mac a go. That mucked me up for a bit. The same thing happened; Entempo went to USB graphic, and nothing appeared on the Mac, anywhere, just like on the LINUX boxes. My hopes were beginning to wane a bit.

Sadly, when I unplugged the unit from the Mac, I was disappointed with the persistence of the USB graphic. Whoa! I did some poking around and found the little "unplug correctly using Windows disconnect" warning in the install manual. Uh...duh. There's no such beast on the LINUX boxes; the automatically mounted devices (thumb drive) sometimes offer "unmount" in a context menu, but often not--usually you just pull the plug and it's happy. If I've manually mounted something, I'll manually unmount it first--I always check to see if I need to unmount it first. On the Mac, however, I didn't even see the device, so I had nothing to unmount.

I tried the reset button. Poked a paperclip in there. Nothing. Poked a thumbtack in there, thinking maybe the paperclip was too big. Nothing. Hit the manuals again. Found the secret key of pressing and holding play, hit the reset, release reset, release play. That worked.

A little disappointed, I rebooted the Suse to Windows and plugged the box in. Windows made the "new device plugged in" chime, and I was presented with the "media found, what to do" dialog box. Before continuing, I poked through the user manual. One thing I noticed was a bit of comment that the device should be on before plugging it into the USB. I hadn't done that. Plugging it in turned it on; perhaps a happy side effect?

I thought to give Suse another shot. I correctly disconnected the USB in Windows, unplugged the device, rebooted back to LINUX (really all I use Windows for is when I'm working on Microsoft-based work like my current Visual C++ project, or playing games not available on other platforms like Sims or one of the world conquering games...). I logged in and let Suse come to rest; I use KDE mostly and it reloads all of the applications that were open when you closed last, and theres the news ticker, etc. I watched the CPU meter until it went into its normal spiking from zero to one percent...I've always guessed it's the ticker or GUI--blip, blip, blip on the CPU all the time.

Once as idle as it gets, I turned on the unit and plugged it in. The CPU shot to 100%, and I waited. Shortly Suse said it recognized the device and offered to configure it. It does this sometimes with the USB mouse as I use the Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch between screens, so I said "yes." It then offered to partition the device; I said "no." It then went back to rest. Hmm.

Nothing in the drives folder, nothing auto-mounted at all. I checked the mount table, and nothing there. On a whim, I tried sudo mount /dev/sda usb and lo and behold, it was there! Sadly, the quick mount makes root own everything, but sometimes the Windows-formatted thumb drive presents everything as root-owned anyway. So I started the copy sudo cp -Rv mp3/* usb and copying it went.

Woo and hoo.

Of course, prior to this I read through the manual to see where to copy things (it suggested the root), and I looked at the existing directory and found nothing that looked like it would conflict. The documentation reads like it might find and use the .M3U files generated by the CD ripping software, which will keep the songs in album order, which can be nice. The copy is going alphabetically, and we're up to "Sting." Ooh, now "The Allman Brothers Band." I've ripped 270 CDs into my 15GB collection. There's a few more around here somewhere...they'll get theirs.

It's really this easy (your devices and paths may be different):

(as root or with sudo as necessary)

sudo mount /dev/sda ~/usb
sudo cp -Rv ~/mp3/* ~/usb
sudo umount ~/usb

Yes, of course, there are more options you can put in place with the mount to make it so you don't have to sudo the copy. Use at your own level; I'm dumbing it down here to make it easy.

Now I just have to find a friendly way to keep the songs in sync.

I decided to blog this so that whoever happens upon it after me can have easier luck than I did. I had searched for anyone with an Entempo using it on LINUX, and didn't find squat. I'm going to send a terse copy of this to Entempo, and try to find some nice MP3 LINUX board and put one there, too.

Until then...don't SPAM my blog.