Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I’m still trying different applications to manage the “rip CD to FLAC, update tags, download cover art, play in Linux and transcode to OGG and synchronize to my Fuze” process.  There’s also a separate path for Podcasts, but that’s another story.

The latest victim is Amarok.  I started with my CD collection in ~/Music.  Most of it is in FLAC format in the standard ARTIST/ALBUM/SONGS directory structure.  In each album directory is Cover.jpg, which is the full size album art.  As we know from our reading, the Fuze’s screen is 220×176, so anything bigger than that is a waste of space and if it’s too big, the Fuze won’t show it at all.  So scaling the images is required.  The fuze will look for a file called folder.jpg to display, so the image file has to be renamed too.

Starting Amarok, I told it where the music was, then tried to tell it about the Fuze.  It didn’t autodetect the player, despite it being mounted to /media/SANSA FUZE.  Then I installed libmtp. That didn’t help either. So I manually added it as a generic audio player. Now synchronizing a directory of OGG files worked fine, but no cover art. Transferring a directory of FLAC files failed entirely, leaving them in the transfer queue with X icons next to them, but not telling me why they failed.