On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 04:07:54PM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote: > but does any of these USB jukebox players work with linux?
The Pjbox does. Works great. You can get one from thinkgeek: they're a bit spendier than the Nomad Jukebox from Creative, but I find them to be much nicer: the Nomad, for reasons known only to Creative, is -huge-, about the size of a CD player. The Pjbox, otoh, is small, quite literally I put mine in my shirt pocket. (The Nomad has other problems than size: the battery life is a paltry 4 hours or so... the pjbox charges in about 3 hours for a 10 hour play time. It even uses a Li ion battery, ie, the same one in modern laptops, for nice rechargability without the 'memory' problems of NiCads. Oh, yeah, and Creative hasn't been forthcoming with docs needed for Linux support, while Compaq release a stack of docs, a kernel module and demo client code.) All in all, the pjbox is superbly engineered. The packaging (ie, the box it comes in) is ugly as sin, the manual is sorta, um, silly... and Compaq, who designed it, has a goofy generic license on their software web site, though once you download the software, it's all very happily GPL'd. (There was a stink on /. about the generic license that Compaq has on -everything- you download from that site, even when it is specifically stated to be GPL.... but you know how /. stories go...) It's certainly a product designed by engineers, and, it seems, marketed by them: the 'marketing' side of things like the box and the manual are cheesy, but who cares? :) Oh, yeah, it even comes with a cute adapter/charger thing that takes anywhere from 110VAC to 220VAC at 50hz-60Hz with replacable 'prongs' so you can take it abroad... and the USB cable and a cable to plug it into your stereo and a pair of very nice sounding Koss folding headphones (how the hell they have decent bass is beyond me....) There's a gui thingie being written for it, but I find it easy enough to use Compaq's command line thing to copy mp3's to it. Alas, Compaq's command line stuff doesn't do deletion (which actually -is- a tricky problem with the way the things works), but that's trivial to do: I just download the song list (ie, "catalog"), delete what I don't like, change names, etc, and then re-upload it. The rest of their software is smart enough to use that to figure out which blocks are allocated. [A nifty feature of the filesystem on the pjbox is that you can copy a huge file, such as a single giant mp3 of an entire album and then have individual tracks represent just pieces of that mp3... and you can have items in the catalog overlap or just be listed twice, for cheapo playlist type stuff, effectively the same sort of thing as a hard link in Unix, but taken at the 'block' level instead of the inode level.] And, no, I don't work for thinkgeek or pjbox's maker (HanGo Electronics of Taiwan) or Compaq or have any real interest in them except for the one I now carry with me. :) The little baby 64M players, I don't see the point of. I don't know what song I want -next-, let alone for the next hour, or "you're stuck with this hours worth of music all day". Icky. -- CueCat decoder .signature by Larry Wall: #!/usr/bin/perl -n printf "Serial: %s Type: %s Code: %s\n", map { tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/; $_ = unpack 'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_; s/\0+$//; $_ ^= "C" x length; } /\.([^.]+)/g;