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Jazpiper Linux
The Jazpiper is a pocket MP3 player thats made by RFC out of Singapore, which is where I got mine last year. For what I think about this thing read my review, but for those in a hurry, I like this player, the sound quality is stunning. Now for the problem, out of the box just as expected there is no support for anything other than Windoze, which is not good, especially for me as I do not have a Windoze machine. All is not lost there is a open source app that works.
UPDATE: For all those looking for a replacement parallel cable for this player, I can not help you, but did come across this site that claims to be selling them again soon.
Last year I was going to do the work and write Linux support, and contacted the Australian importer and RFC direct, and got ignored by both of them, charming? its not as if I was looking for funding or even a free player, all I wanted was information. Anyway after some extensive digging on the net it seems someone beat me to it.
So far there is no home page for this app, which by the way is called "openjaz" and is hosted on sourceforge just like almost every other open source project out there. What this openjaz app does is allow you to use your Jazpiper with Linux, upload and download etc. Have a look at this page to download the app.
Before you download it you need to know a few things, firstly this is not released code, its only in the alpha stage, and also its command line only, although I have found "linpiper" another project which has a GUI for openjaz. Just be aware that is also early in its development, I have not tested it, so cannot really comment on how good or otherwise it is, all I can say is it looks interesting, and I would be interested in hearing user feedback.
OK now you have downloaded the openjaz-0.1.2.tar.gz, now uncompress it with the following command
tar xvfz openjaz-0.1.2.tar.gz
This will create a directory called openjaz in your current working directory, which in turn contains two additional ones, these being sys and openjaz. The sys dir hold the driver to actually support talking to the piper, while openjaz contains the command line app to let you download files to the piper. As you would expect the driver needs to be compiled first.
TIP: For help with handling compressed files under Linux/Unix/OSX see my HOWTO, which covers most of the common formats in detail.
Compiling the driver
In the sys directory there is a INSTALL file that covers the install, you really need to read this file, even though I will cover the installation in more detail here. Before starting you need to make sure that you are running a 2.4.x Kernel. If you are not sure use the following command.
uname -a
Which on my system returns the following information
Linux sol4 2.4.3-ac5 #2 SMP Say Apr 14 23:44:43 EST 2001 i686 unknown
Its the 2.4.3 bit you are interested it, these days there are 2.2, 2.4.x, 2.5 and soon 2.6. The INSTALL notes from the author does say it should work with older Kernels, but as I have not tested it, I will follow the 2.4.x advise. In addition to this you will also need Kernel parallel port support, this one should not be a issue as it should be a default in all vendor supplied Kernels. If you have compiled your own Kernel and disabled this, thats not good, you will need to re-enable it. See the Kernel HOWTO for help doing this.
That out of the way, I am now assuming that you are running a 2.4.x Kernel with parallel port enabled and working. So onto the actual compilation, which is a very simple process, run the following, (which I pulled straight out of the INSTALL file). The only thing I need to add is that this needs to be done as the root user.
make
make install
insmod openjaz
Now as the INSTALL file says, if you have multiple parallel ports then you need to specify this on the insmod line. As most home users will not and to avoid confusing anyone, I am not going to cover this here, see the INSTALL file for more help on that one. While on the subject of confusion, I have been asked several times about the insmod command so have included a link to the online manual page which should help.
At this point you should have installed the Kernel module (the actual driver), now you need to create the device node, which is, put very simply a entry in the /dev directory that is used to access the Jazpiper device. OK I said that was a simple "What is a device node?", had a quick look on the net and could not find a good link, if anyone has a good one please mail me. Now this node is created with the following command, yes right out of the INSTALL file.
mknod /dev/jazpiper c 10 `cat /proc/misc | grep openjaz | cut -b1-3`
chmod 666 /dev/jazpiper
Now this looks slightly more complex that you would hope for, but as the author says there is a good reason for this. Without going into detail on device nodes, its to do with the minor node reference which is dynamically assigned. Confused, well yes, but you do not need to understand this one, as the author says you need to create a script that contains the above commands, and execute this each time you reboot. One last thing the mknod command is another that I have been asked about, so here is a link to the online manual page, but be warned its heavy reading. Also just for good measure here is the manual page for the chmod command.
Thats it, the end of the driver installation.
Compiling the application
In the openjaz directory also has a INSTALL file that explains it all. Not that there is much to explain, just change into the openjaz directory and run the following command.
make
yes thats it, in the openjaz dir there is now a file called openjaz, which you are advised to move to /usr/local/bin before using.
Using the openjaz application
Included with the source for the app, is a README file that shows example usage, as usual I recommend that you look at this before continuing. I will cover my experiences using this application below.
First here are the command line switches that are currently supported.
List the files already in the player.
openjaz -l
Show memory usage
openjaz -m
Delete file(s)
openjaz -r tracknumber tracknumber
Upload to player
openjaz -p filename filename
Download from player
openjaz -g directory tracknumber
TIP: I found when uploading that sometimes the player cannot be found, yes no connect comes up on the player LCD, to get rid of this do a openjaz -m a few times and the connection is OK. Also when uploading multiple files, it does sometimes fail on the last file if you use more than 2 files. Gets worse it seems to work differently on different machines, maybe the communications protocol is system speed specific.
Links and Related Pages
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