Linux Desktop Hacks

Sync Your iRiver with Linux #98

Chapter 11, Hardware

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299

HACK

A number of these personal music players are on the market, but one of the

most intriguing is the iRiver series. Not only do these little boxes pack in

upward of 40GB of storage, but they also support a variety of different

codecs beyond plain MP3. Some of you might be aware that encoding MP3

is actually a legally foggy area, as the codec was created and licensed by

Fraunhoffer, and many free encoders are not properly licensed. A free MP3

alternative called Ogg Vorbis exists that promises both higher quality and

smaller file size. This format is gaining in popularity, and the iRiver, unlike

the iPod, supports it out of the box.

To get songs on your iRiver, you need to rip your CDs to get the tracks onto

the hard disk of your Linux machine, encode them as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis,

and then upload them to the iRiver via USB. Optionally, you can then build

the iRiver internal database for your MP3s (you cannot use the database for

Ogg files). The iRiver IHP series of players use a special internal database

that stores all the details of your song titles, albums, genres, and other infor-

mation. One issue to bear in mind is that the iRiver lacks support of Ogg

Vorbis tags. This means Ogg metadata will not be included in the database.

If you want to use ID tags (these tags store information about the artist,

album, track number, and so on), you need ...