I've had one of these great MP3 players since they came out in 1994:
http://the-gadgeteer.com/2004/06/28/...player_review/
It was laid aside after 14 years being my truck music machine. It was upgraded to a 2.5" 120GB Toshiba IDE laptop drive years ago. Its Li-Ion 2AH cell died, finally, so I simply laid it aside. This week, I resurrected it with a new 2.6AH 4/3A Li-Ion cell using the old battery charge controller that was easy to move to the new cell.

Hmm...this thing acts like a USB2 hard drive when you plug it into a PC. It's SELF-POWERED by its BATTERY! Wonder what happens if I plug it into one of my N800s via the swivel USB adapter from Electronics Online? It draws no power from the port, being self powered.

VOILA! The 120GB N800 external hard drive with built-in MP3 player, audio recorder and FM radio! Works like a champ! Playing MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV music no longer eats N800 CPU cycles! Everything runs faster! Just let the external USB drive play the music....for days!

I've been cycling the new cell to bring up its capacity. It will play MP3s, driving two speakers directly, for over 32 hours on a charge. No telling how long it'll run playing DivX movies.

Storage is no longer an issue...(c;] Just thought you'd like to know it works great. DMC is toast. These are still available on Ebay. The nice leather case also protects it and hangs it on your belt. Too bad it doesn't have Bluetooth PAN.

Does anyone know how to shutdown the automatic ID3 tag loading or thumbnailing pictures and movies? Any drive like this big one is useless because I can't stop EVERY file browser on ANY program from trying to dissect and store 10,000 MP3 ID3 tags, 15000 jpeg thumbnails.

The tablet goes into full load and the memory loads up. There's got to be some way I haven't found to DO NOTHING as WinXP opens that little selection box asking you what you want it to do with media files. DO NOTHING, unfortunately isn't XP's default selection, but at least it gives me a choice when it opens a new drive. How do I tell a Diablo N800 to DO NOTHING??

Any help greatly appreciated. The drive is useless if I can't get this to stop.....

The quickest solution is to disable metalayer-crawler, the Maemo media scanner. See this post for a quick (although somewhat ugly) solution.

Of course, this will mean that your media stops getting indexed by the Media Player, but that sounds like it will be OK with you...

I personally like XMMS better for music anyway

I have it installed but freeze All the time after 43-7 edition, and has since stop using it. I like it too. Are you still using it with your Diablo version? Any problem?

bun

Bun,

I couldn't answer your question until now, because I hadn't been using my tablet for much music lately.

But this afternoon / evening, I did a four hour drive through the mountains (in my Miata) with the top down and the tablet plugged into the audio system. XMMS was playing the whole time, and except for a couple of times where there was some brief cutting in and out (and that could have been another part of my system, it seemed to happen only after I started the car after being stopped), it worked great.

Weirdest thing? It was on random play mode, and I got Johnny Cash's Ghost Riders in the Sky followed by U2's "The Wanderer". Coolest thing? Just after sunset, Simon and Garfunkel's "America" came on, and when the lyrics, "the moon rose over an open field," the moon suddenly became visible...

XMMS? I just could never get the hang of it. Currently my favorite under Ubuntu is Banshee. On the N800 I have no clear favorite. I find that disabling Metalayer-crawler is no biggie in terms of functionality. Indexing doesn't automagically happen but the improved battery life is worth it.

I am jealous of the Miata though. I have 1.5 more kids to get through college first, then lookout!.

I'm shocked people still use XMMS.

Wow, cool, this thing is even better than Microsoft and Ford's voice driven Sync. Now we don't even have to bark commands at the car audio, its tuned to nature and the changing drivescape. That is way too cool qole.

It's unfortunately (if unsurprisingly) as buggy as the day development stopped. But the UI, and more importantly, the scope (I hate stupid music-library-manager type programs), is just right for playing music, IMHO. Since it was good enough 10 years ago, why wouldn't some people still use it? It's not like playing music has changed.

I have been taking Audacious for a spin lately on my Eee, because it's less buggy, but there's a noticeable higher CPU hit when using visualizations (no plugins, just the scope or FFT in the main window), and it redraws itself agonizingly slow (translation: slow enough I can see it at all) when switching workspaces; XMMS has no visible redraw.

What I really want is a hybrid of XMMS and mpd; with XMMS's input/effects plugins, mixer, etc. capabilities in the server, and an XMMS UI client for control, but with the sane and proper client-server separation, and the ability to use other clients when more suitable, such as for scripting or remote use.

An early model Miata like mine (mine is a 1990) is surprisingly inexpensive. You may have to do some searching for one in good condition, though.

EDIT:

My car's 20 years old and it's still lots of fun too! ;-)