Music update

My new portable music player did not, alas, arrive in time to use for the flight, but I did get it as soon as I got back in town and have been playing with it. I'm planning on writing up a web page giving all the details of what was required to get it to work, but here are some preliminary notes, mostly so that I don't forget things.

It uses a VFAT file system. Helpful to have the kernel module for VFAT built. Note that building the FAT kernel module, while required, is not, in fact, sufficient, as that module just provides common infrastructure and doesn't actually implement a file system. As is stated clearly in the documentation that I clearly didn't read.

When rsync'ing data to a VFAT file system, use --modify-window=1, or rsync thinks it has to do more update work than it actually does. Another annoying thing about VFAT is that it doesn't support a full character set range, which means that album and artist names with certain characters need to get recoded for VFAT storage.

I now see what people mean about 20GB of music being quite a bit to handle on a portable player. It's particularly a lot to handle on a player with a more annoying control than a simple rocker switch for scrolling and with no page up or page down buttons. I really could have done without the "slide your finger on this" interface. Anyway, the album/artist/genre menus are way too long to bother scrolling through -- thankfully, they're just m3u files (one of the reasons why I bought this player), so I can make them be anything I want.

The stuff I downloaded off the web to build .m3u files doesn't understand that, in practice, Ogg Vorbis tags are case-insensitive and is going to require some re-education. (Although given that I thought grip was doing all of my tagging, I wonder how I ended up with different case conventions for different files; maybe retagging my files is a better option.)

I think the way I'm likely to end up using this thing is to build a randomized list of all songs with three stars or higher from Madman and then copy that over as All.m3u, lying to the player about what "all" means. It's still rather nice to have all the music there and I can find it by file hierarchy browsing if I really need to (although at some point I need to figure out a way to fix the directory names used for my music collection without confusing madman).

Wow, I own a lot of crap that I'm never going to listen to.