LincolnBlogs

I finally caved over the weekend and bought a new mp3 player. It has been a LONG time since I bought one, in fact the newest one I had was a one gb player (a _few_ years old). I have been listening to my tunes portably on my Nokia N800, but that is a pain in the butt. Let’s face it, the N800 is a full fledged computer and not just a media player, hence it’s not really designed with that sort of ease of operation, not to mention it’s a good bit bigger than your average mobile music player these days.

As an OpenSource kinda guy I tried very hard to stay away from the vendor lock in that the iPods provide, even though they are pretty darn slick. I kept looking around for one that looked a bit more OpenSource friendly. What I found was the Sansa Fuse (I picked up the silver 8gb version). It’s a credit card sized player that does pics, videos, fm-radio and all sorts of music formats including ogg. I have to say that so far, I really dig this little thing. It sounds great and works well. Just plug in the USB cable and it mounts up as a mass storage device and you can drag your music to the Music directory. When you unhook, you are ready to start listening within a few seconds.

Of course, I ran into an issue. Nothing with the player, mind you, but with my aging music collection. Much of it is so old that it is either not tagged or not tagged correctly, resulting in everything showing up on the Fuse as “unknown”. FEH. I had to fix it, and after some searching I came across EasyTag, which, oddly enough, really is easy to use. Just a quick apt-get install and I had it running on my Ubuntu machine and then proceeded to fix the tags of the initial set of music files I was putting on the Fuse. It was a piece of cake, and once they were reloaded on the Fuse with tags, I had working genres and albums and band names, etc. It was great except for one last thing. I needed album cover art. With a couple quick googles, I found that the Fuse would display album art named “folder.jpg” in each folder. And I found a fantastic place to get this art too: AlbumArt.org. Everything I have copied from there has displayed perfectly on the Fuse.

So there you have it. A great little music player which appears to work end to end with Linux. What more could a guy ask for? Well, the best part is it was $50 cheaper than a similar iPod! 🙂