Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

Having arrived in middle-age far too starry-eyed for my own good, I always go to some lengths to find hardware or software compatible with GNU/Linux. My search for a portable music player was no exception. Eventually, I found what I wanted in a Sans Clip 4 gigabyte player, but at times I wondered if the manufacturer was trying to hide the compatibility.

My demands were simple. I wanted a player that supported Ogg Vorbis format, which is not only a free standard but -- so far as I can hear -- superior in sound quality to MP3. I also wanted one that included Ogg support out of the box; I knew that I could use Rockbox or iPodLinux to liberate an iPod, but I was no more eager to give my money to Apple than to Microsoft. Besides, as usual with Apple, iPods are overpriced compared to similar hardware from other manufacturers.

However, I would have been missed the fact that a Sansa Clip was a candidate for my purchase if I had no resource except the manufacturer's product page. Although the Sansa Clip's firmware has supported Ogg for a year and has always worked on GNU/Linux, SanDisk still hasn't got around to mentioning the facts consistently in its advertising -- never mind that mentioning them would take less than a dozen words and might increase sales by a percent or two. I only found the information here and there at various vendors. Even, then, the information was so intermittent that I researched the fact carefully on the web before I trusted it.

I had to do equal research to find out whether the Sansa Clip required special software to operate, or could be mounted under GNU/Linux like any other external USB drive. Eventually, I discovered that it could -- but why didn't the manufacturer bother to mention the simple fact?

Once I researched the purchase and brought it home, I thought my troubles were over. It turned out, however, that the efforts to use the Clip with the operating system of my choice were not quite over.

The Clip recharged under GNU/Linux just fine (although products that can't be used for three hours until they recharge are a gripe for another day). However, a little experimentation soon showed that the automatic detection for supported USB protocols would always default to MTP, a DRM-supporting standard developed by Microsoft. I could use MTP under both GNOME and KDE, but naturally I preferred the more standard and less restrictive MSC protocol.

To use that by default, required me to go into Settings -> System Info ->USB Mode to adjust the default
That change meant that files I had transferred under MTP were no longer visible, except in the memory that they occupied, which lead to more puzzlement. Discovering that fact added another twenty minutes to setup.

Yetl another problem occurred when I decided to upgrade the firmware. If you are a Windows user, you are provided with a script called Sansa Update for automating the process, but in GNU/Linux you are on your own.
Here are the steps I learned after another search on the web:

1. Check your firmware by going to Settings -> System Info -> Version # on the player, then checking the release of the latest revision online (the Wikipedia entry lists it, if the Sansa download page doesn't). If a more recent revision is available, you need to make sure that you download the right version, since a player that uses 1.x release of the firmware cannot use a 2.x version.
2. Prepare to install the new firmware, by locating a copy on the web and then downloading and unzipping the .BIN file it contains. Make sure that your battery has at least a 50% charge, so that it doesn't run out of power in the middle of the upgrade.
3. Set the player to Hold, then hold the center button while plugging the player into a USB port.
4. Once the player mounts, copy the file into the root directory of the clip. Disconnect the Clip and restart it, and the firmware updates.

All in all, a straight forward process. But that was the third bit of research I needed to do just in order to set things up.
As a long-time GNU/Linux user, I am probably better able to do such things than most computer users. If anything, I have come to take for granted that I will have to. Still, I have to add that the effort considerably reduced my pleasure in the new player, because nothing indicated that I would have to make it. From the little product information that I could scrape together, I assumed that the support was out of the box.

SanDisk deserves credit for supporting Ogg and multiple operating systems, and for not obfuscating things by requiring unnecessary proprietary software to connect to its player. But, after having made these efforts, why is the corporation apparently so reluctant to receive credit?

Admittedly, GNU/Linux users must be a minority of Clip users But they may be more numerous than anyone expects, because the Clip is one of the few current players that can meet their needs whose storage capacity is not hopelessly outdated and small. Moreover, adding the instructions I've given here would mean less than a page or an hour's effort for the Clip's product managers. Is it really too much to expect out of the box support for GNU/Linux when a product is halfway there? Because it creates high expectations, in some ways such a product is more frustrating than one which makes no claim of support for me or mine.

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