I’m one of those people that refuses to get an IPOD. I think they are too expensive and they don’t play nice with Linux.

Last Christmas, I bought myself the 4GB Coby mp305 because it has more capacity than the Sandisk Sansa m200. The interface is crap compared to the Sansa m200. It doesn’t read the mp3 ID3tags at all. The navigation tree is simply the directory structure.

The major flaw is that it does not always sort files in the directory in the correct order. I finally figured out that it sorts files by the order that they were put on the device. However, for some reason in linux if you do “cp -R”, it doesn’t put them on in the proper order.

Here’s my script to put files on the device, it’s call coby_copy.sh:

#!/bin/bash
 
if [ !-d $1 ]; then
   echo "Source Directory does not exists"
   exit
fi
 
if [ !-d $2 ]; then
   echo "Target Directory does not exists"
   exit
fi
 
echo "arg1 = $1 arg2 = $2"
 
IFS=`echo -en "\n\b"`
 
for FILENAME in `find $1 -type f -iname "*mp3" -print | sort | sed 's/^\.\///'` 
do
  DIR=`dirname $FILENAME`
  mkdir -p $2/$DIR
  echo $FILENAME
  cp $FILENAME "$2/$DIR"
done

To run it:

coby_copy.sh "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon"  "/mnt/disk/Audio Books"