Using rsync with the iriver T60

[David Fletcher]

I was about to ask how to get this to work, but I think I might have solved it 
with another last look down the documentation before I clicked on the send 
button.

I have an annoying little problem known as the iriver T60 audio player.

It plays Ogg files from my PC perfectly well, but only in the same order in 
which it thinks they were copied onto its flash memory. It makes no attempt 
to sort the file names into alphabetical order to play them.

So, if I just use Konqueror (I'm using Kubuntu Feisty) to drag whole 
directories of files onto it, the music plays just fine but the track order 
is all scrambled.

However if I laboriously create the directories on the player myself, then 
manually drag the files onto it, one at a time, in the correct order, they 
play in the correct order. This, of course, is a PITA.

So, I was thinking can I use rsync to do the job for me? Here is the command 
I've used:-

rsync -rvtW --delay-updates --modify-window=1 /MiscUsersFiles/Music/Dave/T60/ /media/disk/Music/

I was hoping that the -W parameter might cause it to do the job, but no. 
The --delay-updates seems to be the proper magical incantation.

The T60 now appears as disk in /media/ since I managed to foul it up properly 
and did a reformat (I'll see if I can set it back to T60 later).

After an initial write of my music files to the freshly reformatted T60, every 
single album is now listed on the player in the correct order. So now the 
question is, does my use of the --delay-updates option increase the number of 
write cycles to the flash memory, or is it all sorted out in a buffer on the 
PC before everything gets transferred over the USB cable?

Regards,

Dave Fletcher

-- 
Registered Linux user number 393408