Clip Connectivity Woes

[freeradical]

I've got a Clip 2GB Black.

I just got this about 24 hours ago and I've been really sad with the apparent bugginess of the firmware. I'm got a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS 10.4--I know it's not officially supported, but since the Clip can switch to MSC it shouldn't be a problem.

I have used my friend's PC to change the drivers to USB mass storage a la the forum post about the Express, but these symptoms persist regardless of whether the Windows Device Manager says the Clip is MSC or MTP.

1) Mounting
Half the time the device doesn't even mount on my Powerbook, though the icon on the Clip display indicates the battery is charging. This is often fixed by my restarting my computer . . . which doesn't make much sense to me.

2) Freezing
If I unplug the Clip while it's on (regardless of my Mac or my friend's PC, even regardless of whether I've "ejected" it from the Mac OS or not) it freezes in the middle of the "Connected" animation, and must be reset. This definitely shouldn't happen.

3) Audiobooks
I sprang for this player to replace my Express almost completely because of the Audible format support. Being new to audiobooks in general, maybe somebody can point out my mistake. I got the Clip mounted in the Mac OS, and copied an iTunes Music Store audiobook to the MUSIC folder. This file is appended as .m4b, further identified as protected MPEG-4 Audio. This didn't show up on the Clip when I tried to find it--maybe that's no surprise. Then I copied a .aa file straight from Audible.com onto the clip, and found the same problem--no files available. I have copied these into both the MUSIC directory and the AUDIBLE directories and the Clip still hasn't recognized any files.


Anybody have any good ideas? Oh, and the method noted in this forum, the hold+center-button trick to force MSC mode, doesn't seem to do anything. Thanks for any help.

--Ian

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