Philips GoGear and Linux

For those looking for a way to sync your music files with your Philips GoGear media player, you’ll likely find that MusicMatch is the officially supported tool. However, for those who wish to use this with Linux, MusicMatch is not an option. It only took me two minutes to find this set of tools available for the Linux community provided by the Linux community.

Linux Digital Media Manager (LDMM) has the ability to add and delete MP3s from the device, and manage the album and artist databases. It has a GUI front-end and a straightforward interface. It was written in Python specifically for the HDD060, but should work fine with the HDD070 as well.

openGogear is a suite of tools for working with Philips GoGear HDD0xx MP3 players. Though these devices can be mounted with the standard usb-storage module, these tools implement the file indexing required to hear MP3s. openGogear has a debian package available. JGoGear is the Java-based GUI front-end for openGogear.

PyGogear is obviously written in Python exchanges information about the tracks from a Sqlite database file, usually named MyDb. This program reads the ID3v1 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts the most important ones in the database. There is no GUI available yet, but it is in the works.

pymaj was rewritten from pyGogear 5.8.4 with some changes and folders support added. Program can read the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts them in the database. M3U playlists are supported as well.

Philips

See my previous post regarding Philips GoGear here.

Update: Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) mounted the HDD070 as ‘Philips MassStorage-Disc: 1.9GB Removable Volume’ available under ‘Computer’. Its actual location is /media/usbdisk/. Under this device, you’ll find the following structure: 

/_system/
    /firmware/
        /FWimage.bak
        /FWimage.oke
    /media/
        /audio/
            all mp3 files here...
            MyDb (the file that contains the ID3 index information)
/drmv1pm.tmp

10/23/2005 | Entertainment, Free Software, Gadgets, Hardware, Linux | Comments

2 Responses to “Philips GoGear and Linux”

  1. Posted by: MAC Z - 10/19/2007

    I have HDD 1830 Gogear… Can you tell me how can I use it on Ubuntu ?

  2. Posted by: cranst - 10/29/2007

    It has been two years since this post. A lot can happen in two years. First of all, I’m assuming you’ve already tried just plugging in the device and checking to see if it shows up as a hard drive or a device in one of the Media Management applications. Essentially all information I knew about getting my GoGear to work is listed above. I will say that I found myself using the command line to manage my music more often than I’d like, but I think I was looking for a quick fix. One thing I had read is that the libmtp should be offering support for such devices. See this page for details on that: http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/doc/libmtp-doc

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