I was helping a friend get a Gigabeat (1GB flash-based) MP3 player working with their iBook. I got it running, but I ran into a couple of hitches that I figured I might as well ask about. The player is this one, which is a Japanese model but I'm guessing not significantly different from models available elsewhere:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/03/19/toshiba-gigabeat-u101-and-u201-daps-directly-encode-mp3s/
First, it did work, albeit as a bit of a kludge. It does mount in the Finder, and if you copy MP3 files from iTunes anywhere into its music folder it auto-detects them, gets the artist, title, and album info directly from the MP3 file (so it did NOT matter where in the file structure they were, they'd be sorted correctly in its interface), and played them.
I tried using the two 3rd-party synch tools--Synctunes and XNJB. XNJB didn't see it, but Synctunes did appear to recognize it properly... but only under Leopard. For some reason, though Synctunes would launch fine in 10.4, it wouldn't actually see the Gigabeat even when it was mounted.
It's not necessary, but anybody have suggestions?
My other question is about its capacity. When I mounted it, it was showing as having exactly zero bytes available. I deleted a few of the existing files via the Finder and could then copy MP3s to it, so that was working fine. However, it was only showing as having a total capacity of about 900MB. Obviously there could be a number of reasons for the "missing" 100GB (firmware, format, GiB/GB, whatever), but the fact that it was showing as zero bytes free made me wonder if the volume it shows the OS is somehow auto-expanding.
Anybody know anything about this? Were I to put another 100MB of music on it via a Windows interface (or its own input), then delete that via the Finder, would it then have a more-or-less-full 1GB available?
Longshot, I know, but doesn't hurt to ask.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/03/19/toshiba-gigabeat-u101-and-u201-daps-directly-encode-mp3s/
First, it did work, albeit as a bit of a kludge. It does mount in the Finder, and if you copy MP3 files from iTunes anywhere into its music folder it auto-detects them, gets the artist, title, and album info directly from the MP3 file (so it did NOT matter where in the file structure they were, they'd be sorted correctly in its interface), and played them.
I tried using the two 3rd-party synch tools--Synctunes and XNJB. XNJB didn't see it, but Synctunes did appear to recognize it properly... but only under Leopard. For some reason, though Synctunes would launch fine in 10.4, it wouldn't actually see the Gigabeat even when it was mounted.
It's not necessary, but anybody have suggestions?
My other question is about its capacity. When I mounted it, it was showing as having exactly zero bytes available. I deleted a few of the existing files via the Finder and could then copy MP3s to it, so that was working fine. However, it was only showing as having a total capacity of about 900MB. Obviously there could be a number of reasons for the "missing" 100GB (firmware, format, GiB/GB, whatever), but the fact that it was showing as zero bytes free made me wonder if the volume it shows the OS is somehow auto-expanding.
Anybody know anything about this? Were I to put another 100MB of music on it via a Windows interface (or its own input), then delete that via the Finder, would it then have a more-or-less-full 1GB available?
Longshot, I know, but doesn't hurt to ask.