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Cowon iAudio S9 with Banshee on Linux

by James Ogley on May 13th, 2009

I just bought a Cowon iAudio S9 music player. It is described as supporting Linux out the box and it does as far as Cowon state – which to say it’s a mass storage device. In fact, it appears to HAL as being a Photo CD and F-Spot gets launched which is fine as it can be used for managing photos too.

The thing is that I want it to work with Banshee too. To do this, I need to persuade HAL that it’s an music player, so with a bit of lshal and some XML munging, I’ve produced a .fdi file for it: 10-cowon-s9.fdi. Save that file, remove the .txt from the end and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/information. Then execute rchal restart (on openSUSE – other distros will likely have a different command to restart HAL) and plug the S9 in.

The only downside I’ve come across so far is the S9′s lack of support for playlists. I’ve included playlist support in the .fdi as Banshee can play from it and I’ve emailed Cowon asking them to add this trivial function to the next firmware update. I’m using the latest Beta firmware and it works fine.

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