Notices

After installing Ovi maps, you will have about 25gb free. Still much better than the other phone options, since you have 25gb AND a micro SD slot

Should that be ovi maps three from that link? And if so, where on n900 do I store it so the maps app can find it?

Yes I definitely appreciate that. When the music player was messing up I was thinking of just returning it and getting the hd2. But with only SD card memory it would be an unhappy marriage. Only real alternative would be iphone but 3 months of having an ipod touch taught me I never want anything to do with apple and their underhand tactics which try to permanently tie you into their products. E.g not being able to export playlists created in itunes.

You unzip the maps data in /home/user/MyDocs/cities/diskcache and it'll be recognized by the maps app. Unfortunately the maps downloader does not support the N900 yet.

OK, take this with a grain of salt, since I don't have an N900 yet, and can't verify what is installed by default (you never know what they'll remove to save space).

1. Open the terminal application from the applications menu.
2. It will probably by default start in your home folder. Type pwd and press enter to check. It should output "/home/user".
3. If your music- and m3u-files are in subfolder Music, run:
cd Music
Capitalization matters. You can use `ls` to list files and subfolders.
4. Run the command I gave earlier, but you MUST adapt it to what the real paths and filenames are on your systems. I used examples. The paths may not include commas, because I used them as the separator for the regular expression.


IF this is the problem, you should try to find a setting that forces your music software to save m3u's with relative paths.

If you want to make sure the paths are being modified the right way, you can use the visual editor (vi) instead of the stream editor (sed). In this case, from step 4, again remembering to not use my example paths:
4. vi old.m3u
5. :1,$s,/home/etuoyo/Documents/Music,/home/user/music,
6. Look at what happened.
7. :wq! fixed.m3u


To read more about the commands use `man command`, but I'm 90% certain that won't work due to space saving, so see what you can find online.



Edit: I decided to explain what the commands do:

cd is change directory. Changing to directory .. will go to the parent directory, ~ to the home directory, and / to the root directory.

sed is a program that will perform a substitution command on each line.

The > at the end redirects the output of sed to a file. You'll note that I specify the input file directly, but I could also do:
cat file | command1 | command2 | command3 > file

cat outputs a file to standard output, and the pipe character connects the standard input of the next command to the standard output of the previous command.

A regular expression substitution is written s/old/new/
But really you can use any separator. Because paths contain slash, I decided to use comma. If you want to use slash anyway, you can escape the slashes in the path with backslash: \/. Regular expressions can be really complex and powerful.

vi is an advanced text editor. The command :1,$s instructs it to do the substitution on every line from 1 to the last line. :wq! filename instructs it to (w)rite the changes to a new file, and (q)uit even though the old file hasn't been changed (!).

If you want to edit the text in vi, you need to press i. To get back to command mode, press escape. This is not enough to get you going, though, so read the manual.

vi is virtually guaranteed to be available, but you should use the more advanced vim when you can.

Ah, thanks for the explanation. I just tried manually editing the playlist to add that path to each line but it is still not finding the files yet. Might still be missing a piece to the puzzle here.

This is promising though, I may eventually be able to work out a script or something that fixes my MediaMonkey m3u's to work in Maemo, which would be better than my only other option right now (manually creating each playlist in the actual Media Player interface)

So to be clear up to this point...there's nothing wrong with the N900 in this case, or the software/media player on it. No reflashing required, this is simply an issue with the specific playlist files in question, and how they're pointing to music on the device.

Is there a way to sync the device using Windows Media Player? It doesn't seem to show up as a device when I open Windows Media Player.

Also does anyone know why for compilation albums it shows the album artist (Various Artists) rather than the song artist. That is pretty annoying cause I am unable to tell who sang many of the songs I am listening to on the device.

See the steps here with media monkey sync.

http://pankajsays.blogspot.com/2009/...ia-player.html

Playlists with no path information at all, just file names, have been working great for me on the n900. This also works for OS2008 on n8x0 devices.