gogear

Here's a quick tool to handle a Philips GoGear MP3 player without using MusicMatch or some other broken software.

These MP3 players store access information of the MP3s in an internal SQLite2 database. My gogear script will essentially re-create the database. In addition, it allows that the MP3 files reside in an arbitrary directory on the device. It will search the entire device for MP3s and enter them in the ${mountpoint}/_system/media/audio/MyDb database accordingly. The default mountpoint is /mnt/gogear but this can be overridden by specifying a command line parameter.

The script will print for each file processed:

${artist} / ${album} / ${title}

This is a heavily hacked version of a script that I found here. Among the changes:

• Correct iMediaType. MP3 files should be 1, not 4.
• Deal with dirTable as well, which permits us to place MP3s in arbitrary directories. Therefore...
• ...scan through all directories on the device and grab all MP3s.
• Limit string length for title, album, and artist to 64 in MyDb. Actually MusicMatch limits to 30 while the MyDb specification allows for 100, but the firmware appears to crash with strings that long. 64 appears to work fine.
• Label empty artist/album/genre as "Unknown".
• Encode filenames in MyDB properly in UTF-8 which is what the firmware expects. This allows us to use non-ASCII filenames on the device.

This is hard-core perl. Zero documentation apart from the source. Requires MP3::Info, DBI, and DBD::SQLite2.

Just drop me a mail if you have suggestions. Please keep in mind that this is intended as a simple, handy tool rather than a full-featured package with lots of knobs.

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last modified by myself at 12 Nov 2007 12:32:53 CET
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