Adding to the MPIO

After having it for around three years, I finally got an expansion card for my MP3 player yesterday. Now it has triple the capacity.

As you may already know, I have a 128MB MPIO FL100 player. It comes with a Secure Digital (SD) card expansion slot. Up until recently, I was too cheap to buy a card to put in it, but while shopping in Target (I love Target), I saw some 256MB Lexar SD cards in the checkout lane. They were only $15 and I had just been thinking about finally getting one, so I couldn't really pass it up.

Unfortunately, the Linux software that I use to access the player (no, it does not work as a USB mass storage device) doesn't support the expansion card for my model. However, there is a simple solution: just use a standard card reader. I was able to copy MP3s onto the card and they were picked up when I inserted it into the player. Yay!

The only problem with this method is that the only SD card reader I have is in my printer, an HP PhotoSmart 7760. It does work, but not as well as I might hope. In addition to being a bit slow, HAL doesn't seem to detect it. The system seems to register the card insert, but no new device node is created. It just uses /dev/sdb, which is created when the system starts up. I'm not sure if that's normal or not, but it is slightly annoying.

But at least everything works. That's really all that's important. Maybe at some point I'll take a look at the code for the MPIO software and see if I can get the external card access working. At the very least, I should look at the KDE-based GUI. It's very non-standard and not particularly easy to use.

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