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I recently purchased a Toshiba Gigabeat. The Gigabeat is allegedly the hardware behind the newly released Microsoft Zune player. The capacity of my player is 40GB which gives me plenty of room to play with. The one complaint I have about the Gigabeat is the technology used to transfer for the tracks to the player: Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) developed by Microsoft.

The player works great with Windows Media Player 10 and Toshiba's own Gigabeat room software. This leaves nothing for the Linux desktop however. There have been projects to allow other players to synchronize in Linux and I have found that with a good bit of tweaking the Gigabeat can also work with Gnomad 2.

My Linux desktop is running Ubuntu Edgy 6.10. I had read somewhere that Gnomad2 would work fine with the Gigabeat. I figured I could install the precompiled packages for Ubuntu and be about my merry way of transferring tracks. I was wrong.

The installed version of Gnomad2 would inform me that no jukebox was found. Following is what I did to get Gnomad2 working:

Install Compiler and make tools
The following packages will allow you to build the libmtp and Gnomad2 projects from source.
sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc

Install development libraries
sudo apt-get install libid3tag0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnjb-dev libusb-dev

Download libmtp from http://libmtp.sourceforge.net. I downloaded libmtp-0.1.0.tar.gz.
Open a terminal window, cd to the download location, and extract this file
tar -xzvf libmtp-0.1.0.tar.gz
cd into the libmtp-0.1.0 directory.
Configure, Compile and Install libmtp
It is important to use the --prefix="/usr" option when compiling libmtp so that Gnomad2 can find the file.

configure --prefix="/usr"
make
sudo make install


Download Gnomad2 from http://gnomad2.sourceforge.net/. As of this writing the latest version is 2.8.9.
Open a terminal window, cd to the download location and extract the Gnomad2 archive.
tar -xzvf gnomad2-2.8.9.tar.gz
Change directory into the gnomad2-2.8.9 directory
Configure, Compile and Install Gnomad2

configure
make
sudo make install


A quirk you will run into is having to unplug the device between sessions of Gnomad2. So, if you've transferred files in Gnomad2, closed Gnomad2 without disconnecting the Gigabeat afterwards, you'll need to do so before you can open Gnomad2 again for synchronization. Gnomad2 also seems to take considerable time grabbing the metadata from the tags of existing tracks on the Gigabeat.

Overall there is a lot of room for improvement with the Gigabeat and Gnomad2 integration but it sure beats having to install a Windows Virtual Machine to transfer files!

I hope this article has helped you. If you have any improvements or corrections please email me at dan@linuxphile.org.

Cheers!