Connecting iRiver IFP 890 MP3/Ogg player

Posted by Wim Koorenneef on 2007-08-09 23:54 CEST

Today I found a mp3 player that I didn't use in quite a while. It has the best sound I've ever experienced with such a small player. Far better than my Ipod I can tell you. And it even plays ogg files.

Anyway, I needed to refresh the content so I installed ifpgui.

sudo apt-get install ifpgui

Trying to connect I kept getting errors that the device was busy. Turns out that you have to run as root to get access to the device. I haven't figured out why. Maybe I'll replace the firmware so I can connect to the player as an USB mass storage device.

After some googling I discovered a gnome utility on http://ifp-gnome.sourceforge.net/ that is not in the Ubuntu repositories. I haven't tried it yet.

UPDATE: Plugging the player in creates these devices:
crw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 254, 22 2007-08-10 20:07 usbdev5.6_ep00
crw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 254, 24 2007-08-10 20:09 usbdev5.6_ep01
crw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 254, 23 2007-08-10 20:09 usbdev5.6_ep81


I found some instructions on the archlinux.org wiki to create a file (as root) with udev rules. I only changes the group from 'storage' to 'cdrom'. The group 'storage' doesn't exist on Feisty. I've attached the udev.rules.