Ubuntu Youth
The future of Open Source is in the Young People of today; that's why this corner of the magazine is for young people or simply those who are young at heart.
Written by Samuel Barrett
The day the music died... Or did it?
Listening to your music or transferring it to your mp3 player in Linux has never been easy. The lack of support for things like drivers for your mp3 player or subscription service so you can download your favourite music has put many people off using Linux, but i would like to take a few minutes of your time to show you the alternatives available and the progress that is being made in the community.
MP3 Player Compatibility
Many mp3 player's work fine and identify as a Mass Storage Device; these include most of the iPods and some cheaper mp3 players, but models like Creative, Samsung, Dell and iRiver use a protocol called MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) which requires libmtp to be installed for your mp3 player to be recognised.
Some mp3 players which require libmtp:
- Creative Zen Portable Media
- CenterCreative Zen MicroPhoto
- Creative Zen Vision
- Creative Zen Vision:M
- Creative Zen Sleek Photo
- Creative Zen Xtra (MTP mode)
- Creative Zen Micro (MTP mode)
- Creative Zen Touch (MTP mode)
- Creative Zen Sleek (MTP mode)
- Dell Pocket DJ
- Samsung YH- and YP- MTP players
Online/Subscription Music Services
Once you have your MP3 Player working in Linux, you obviously want to transfer some music to it; you shouldn't have any problems if you would only like to transfer music tracks from your CD's to your MP3 Player but if you want to download your music you will need to find a compatible music service.
Services like iTunes, Napster, and Virgin Digital aren't compatible with Linux, and even if they were, due to the DRM encryption these companies use you would not be able to play the music downloaded on your Ubuntu machine. Now, new companies are starting to emerge which support Linux and are DRM encryption-free the most well-known is eMusic. eMusic offers DRM-free music for £8.99 a month for 30 downloads but many of the artists available to download are not mainstream.
Another service (available only to the US) and support Linux is Rhapsody. Rhapsody offers unlimited music downloads for a monthly subscription fee but the downloads are DRM-encrypted so can only be used on your mp3 player then played through your mp3 player.
Music in Linux has continued to improve over the last couple of years; as more companies adopt the Linux platform, we should see more compatible mp3 players and more music subscription download services.
