Penny Hero (dot) Net

So I have my new mp3 player.

The thing is bad ass. Not very pretty, but it’s awesome. I transfered all the music from my windows machine as soon as I got it, because I was too lazy and too busy to learn how to get it working in linux. which was fine.

But get this. I went to Gavin’s to study, and he plugged mine into his dock, messed with the network settings and transfered files to my player. pretty neat. He’s running Gentoo, and it took him barely 3 minutes to do this. looked pretty easy.

I got home today, did some googling, and learned how to install Java on ubuntu so that I could install the Rio Music Manager java app to get it working in linux. That part wasn’t so hard (I had help.)

Here’s the wierd part though. I set the player’s IP, open the music manager and log into the device. It downloads the database fine, and I can browse the contents of my player. I just can’t modify anything. It gives me this error like “Unable to synchronize with the current device. Failed to synchronize with device. The contents of the player have been modified outside this application.” wtf mate.

So I google some more. can’t find shit. I try the Rio Taxi app, which lets you transfer non music files onto the device for storage (I assume. although, this doesn’t make sense because you can’t get them back off onto a different machine. still trying to figure that out). The Taxi transfers files perfectly, but of course, they’re useless because it doesn’t update the database with new music entries. gah. So I mess around in the Music Manager some more, just getting the same error.

At one point, I notice that the USB cable is still plugged in from when I was using it in windows, so I pull that out, and just for good measure, I restart the device.

I open Rio Music Manager again, log in, and to my utter disbelief, it works. I could transfer files, yadda yadda. it was great.

That’s when I noticed that I had accidentally opened two instances of the music manager. I laugh at myself, and close one.

The second one promptly breaks, and gives me that error message again.

*boggles*

I close everything and try again. One instance == one annoying error. So I’m like “Fine! I’ll open two!” and whadaya know… the second one works.

What the hell. ha ha. So, I guess it’s a bug of some kind. It works consistently so far, but only when I have two instances of the manager open, and I use the second one to transfer music.

Gavin’s seems to work fine the way it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s an ubuntu problem. Not enough people use this though for there to be any support forums, or even any documentation on this java application. Which is, in part, why I’m writing this entry so that someone might google it and find it helpful someday.