[Guns90]

Hello everyone. My wife and I have been looking at MP3 players for our twin sons and decided to get the Creative Labs Zen V Plus 2Gb, providing I can confirm that they work with Linux. Does anyone here in the forum have the Zen V Plus? If so, is it compatable with Linux, both 32 and 64 bit versions? Thanks for your help.

Gary

[macdude425]

The only media players I can confirm Linux compatibility, with any certainty, are the iPods. They are supported because of their ubiquity.

I just checked, and some Creative players are supported, but that one does not appear to be at the moment.

[Greg]

Generally, if you can put songs on it through an MSC mode or whatever (where the device shows up as a drive on your computer) then you can get it to work with Linux. I have a Sansa and it doesn't say anything about being compatible with Linux, but I switched it to MSC mode and it worked right away.

You also might want to have a look at this page. I'm not sure if it supports it, though.

[Guns90]

Thanks macdule425 and Greg. It's a shame that the 'mainstream' manufacturers do not even acknowledge Linux usage on their products.

Greg, if you don't mind, would you enlighten me about 'MSC'? I'm not familiar with the term, so I don't know what you mean when you say that you 'switched to the MSC mode'.

I have had a Creative Zen Nano Plus working on my 'puter; however, I haven't been able to find a first hand user of the Zen V, is why I was asking. On the Zen Nano Plus, I did a reformat when it showed as a removeable drive and everything worked fine. You would think that the next generation device from Creative would do the same, but you never know, huh?

Gary

[Greg]

The MSC mode basically, like you said, makes it show up as a removable drive. I don't know a whole lot about MTP mode since I mainly use Linux, and MTP only works reliably under Windows. MTP stands for Media Transfer Protocol and was developed by Microsoft (hence the Windows only part). With MTP mode enabled you have to use Windows Media Player (Winamp might work also, I'm not sure) to transfer your songs, while with MSC you just drop 'em on to the drive. Thats about as far as my knowledge of MTP goes, you can read more here if you wish.

I switched my Sansa into MSC mode through an option in the settings menu. I'm not sure how you'd do it on any other players that support it, but I would assume it would also have the option in a menu.

There's probably a way to get it running in Linux, I'm just not sure how hard that is going to be. It might be really complicated or it could just be a matter of installing a program or two. If it supports an MSC mode it will most likely be a whole lot easier.

[Sevoma]

I use a Zen V 4gb. I had to compile to use it because mtp is a new feature. I believe I used this guide: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ight=zen+v+mtp