NWZ S639F and Linux: how to create playlists?

[mbert]

I recently bought the above device which seemed old enough so that it should be properly supported on Linux. I can mount the device and manage my music files but I have so far been unable to create playlists in a way that they are recognised by the walkman.

I tried using fapg to create playlists in .pla or .m3u format, putting the result into /Playlists/ but whenever I navigate to the playlist menu I do not see a single playlist. Funnily there's hardly anything to be found in the internet - this seems strange as the walkman has always seemed to me as one of the more popular products.

Anyone got any advice? Maybe it would be good to setup a HOWTO somewhere....

[CrowdAds]

[meetooman]

Hello, congratulations for your wise choices! The S639F is an awesome player and Linux is a so cool PC OS! (What is your actual distribution?)

The make playlists you must use your Sony player in MTP mode. International Sony Walkman models are MSC/MTP devices with not manual selection. So you must tweak your Linux kernel settings in order to free your player from the usb-storage mode and use it as a plain MTP device. I have made a post in the forum to explain how to achieve it in the Linux section:

How to set the Linux Kernel to use a MTP/MSC device as MTP only.

After that, you must find a good media manager. Well, that's the hardest part...

You can try Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox. I can not tell you for sure which one is working on your distro... this week!
But I find them all uneasy for the task.

For now Banshee works on my openSUSE-11.2 PC. But I warn you that it puts all music files in the root Music folder, if you don't mind. Seeing it working is so new, that I never tried playlists, I always copy entire albums.

I'll be back...

[mbert]

Originally Posted by meetooman

I have made a post in the forum to explain how to achieve it in the Linux section:

How to set the Linux Kernel to use a MTP/MSC device as MTP only.

That was a very good resource, thank you very much! I can now use the mtp-tools command line utilities and actually get out some information
BTW, my distro is Debian Testing, but I installed the more recent version of libmtp 1.0.1.

Originally Posted by meetooman

You can try Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox. I can not tell you for sure which one is working on your distro... this week!
But I find them all uneasy for the task.

For now Banshee works on my openSUSE-11.2 PC. But I warn you that it puts all music files in the root Music folder, if you don't mind. Seeing it working is so new, that I never tried playlists, I always copy entire albums.

Yes, I wasn't happy with them either. I don't like the very idea of 'synchronisation', I rather want a simple file manager allowing me to select and copy files and tag them for playlists. I thought that gnomad2 could be the one for me but it dies with a segfault when loading (before I followed your instructions I had never got that far). Maybe it's because the device is not really supported, maybe something else. I'll probably run it in a debugger to find out

Anyway, I'll be happy to hear more if you find out something!

P.S.: Just recompiled gnomad2 against libmtp 1.0.1, this fixes the crash issue. gnomad2 does not have a particularly beautiful GUI, but it does the job pretty well, tagging and copying. Might be interesting for you, too.

[meetooman]

Originally Posted by mbert

That was a very good resource, thank you very much! I can now use the mtp-tools command line utilities and actually get out some information

I'm glad you can appreciate it. I also started with mtp-tools to sort out my first issues.

Originally Posted by mbert

BTW, my distro is Debian Testing, but I installed the more recent version of libmtp 1.0.1.

You're right, in my case libmtp-1.0.0 was awfully slow to retrieve tracks infos (+16min instead of few seconds). Something must have been corrected with the next version.

Originally Posted by mbert

Yes, I wasn't happy with them either. I don't like the very idea of 'synchronisation', I rather want a simple file manager allowing me to select and copy files and tag them for playlists. I thought that gnomad2 could be the one for me but it dies with a segfault when loading (before I followed your instructions I had never got that far). Maybe it's because the device is not really supported, maybe something else. I'll probably run it in a debugger to find out

I don't sync right now, but I still think it's a good way to go. As always the problem is software implementation.
In Songbird (on windows for MTP), and with the FolderSync extension for Linux and MSC (for now). You will get a smart sync option. You can sync to a selected playlist, so even if you have 100GB of music and a 4GB player you can maintain a <4GB selection-playlist of your music choice of the moment to be easily sync to your device anytime. I think it's nice.

I have just checked Banshee and I can say that it is handling MTP playlists quite well, but only with files already copied to the MTP device. So now you can't transfer a host PC playlist to the device. It's quite limiting but you can at least use Banshee as your device manager with it regardless of any host PC music library.
I opened Amarok2, and I can see the device content, but the device playlists are shown empty. I also can't figure out what's happening to the playlists I try to create with the device tracks. In the end they are not present on the device. By the way MTP file copying is back for me with Amarok version 2.2.1.90.

Originally Posted by mbert

P.S.: Just recompiled gnomad2 against libmtp 1.0.1, this fixes the crash issue. gnomad2 does not have a particularly beautiful GUI, but it does the job pretty well, tagging and copying. Might be interesting for you, too.

Thanks, but sadly gnomad2 is both not pretty and very unstable here... I will not compile it from the sources because coming from years of Gentoo I don't want to do that anymore except for some devel-libraries.

Originally Posted by mbert

Anyway, I'll be happy to hear more if you find out something!

Since I have discovered the mtp-tools and the libmtp source code, I am programming a MTP transfer tool.

[mircomat]

Hey there,

I found you discourse on the search for the same problem. A while ago I found a fix under Ubuntu 8.04 that used Amarok. Now I'm using 10.04 and had to fix again.

Anyway, I just installed Amarok, rebooted and hey presto (haven't used that expression for a while) my Sony get recognised as an MP3 player and I can simply copy music onto it (without starting Amarok!).

Not so bad for a fix, I would say.

Cheers,

Mirco.

[meetooman]

What happens here is mysterious. Does Amarok add some devices informations to the system?