Digital Audio Players for Linux?

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Bill Ricker wrote:
> Mention was made the other night of openness/freeness of brands of 
> digital audio players. Which current models are Linux-friendly, in terms 
> of being able to load podcasts and tracks from a linux system? Act as a 
> USB drive?

My previous MP3 player was the fabulous-if-you're geeky iRiver iHP-120, 
which is probably the unit that Mad Dog was talking about.  It had more 
features than you could ever ask for, but a complicated UI.  Just like I 
Like them.  It mounted like a hard drive, and did like three different 
codecs, and a built-in FM tuner.

When it died, while still under the "why did I pay for this" extended 
warranty from Best Buy, they said that unit wasn't made anymore, and I 
could get a credit towards another MP3 player.  Unfortunately, the newer 
iRiver models are DRM'ed up the wazoo, and cannot mount like a hard 
drive.  Very few on the market still do, or at least ones that had the 
other features I needed.

I ended up getting a Creative Zen Touch 40GB.  It does not mount like a 
hard drive.  However, there are several Linux programs that can talk to 
it, most of which are excellent.  I use gnomad2, which lets me search 
and sort, build playlists, transfer MP3s and other files, and edit the 
MP3 tag data.  Its default screen is a two-pane window with your local 
system on the left and the MP3 player on the right.  Very easy to use.

There's very little I miss by having to use this program over mounting 
like a hard drive, especially since I keep a copy of gnomad2 on my thumb 
drive, if I ever needed to access it from a different machine.

I'm almost completely happy with the unit,  The only downside of it is 
that they tried to be a little too ipod-like, and there's a slide 
control that's touch-sensitive like the ipod wheel, but doesn't work 
nearly as well.  Not a major problem, though.