Linux – What makes a portable mp3 player work well with Linux

linuxmp3music playerportability

I'm in the market for a new portable mp3-player, and will be connecting it mostly to a Linux box, but occasionally to a Windows Vista machine as well. I'm wondering what qualities I should be looking for in a music player that suggest good out of the box Linux support. Having struggled to get my iPod to play nicely with Linux on a consistent basis, I'm hoping that I can find something that offers better native Linux support.

I've noticed a couple things in my search thus far:

  1. Ogg Vorbis support and "Linux Compatible" are highly correlated
  2. Linux Compatible is often qualified with something like "support only for data transfer"

Are these the only sorts of clues I'll be able to follow? I'd appreciate any advice on what to look for or examples of products that do it right.

Best Answer

If you're not averse to installing a custom firmware I would look at the list of supported devices for RockBox. This will let you add music to your mp3 player like it's an external storage device, and has great codec support such as OggVorbis, Flac, and many others. I've used rockbox on my old iPod and it was fantastic, the navigation takes a little bit to get used to but it made my iPod a much more usable device.

Related Question