Here's what I would like to do, but I'm not sure where to start. I have a fairly good background with Linux, taking care of web and application servers, but by no means am I a developer.

Everyday I have about 40 minutes travel time in the car and like everyone and their mothers I would like to listen to music on the way. Except I would like to lazy down my experience just a tad. I have been searching for an mp3 player that can do some sort of wifi and came across the nokia 770 on ebay, which I think I can make work with your help.

I would like to make the 770 a permanent car appliance so that everytime I come home from work, it grabs the wifi network at my apartment, checks for and downloads new songs, and then shuts itself off. Then in the morning, I would just power it on and have it start playback of the songs it synced the previous night. I would also like it to keep track of where it left off in a song, so that if I arrive at my destination in the middle, I can power down, and then power it backup picking up in the song where it left off at power down.

So....what do you think?

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be *overly* difficult to write a shell script that could take care of the mp3 syncing, but as far as remembering your song position and stuff like that, it seems like an application would be nessecary, and I'm not aware of any that currently pack all of that as features. Also, with a 770 you are looking at like, what, 2gig maximum of storage? I'm not sure of the size of your collection but I'm not sure how well that would suit an auto-syncing mp3 player.

Agreed. My preference would be out with the old, in with the new-and 2gig is plenty of "buffer" room to move through new songs. The pickup where I left off feature isnt too much of a loss, just would be a nice feature.

Do you think there is also away to have the loss of power kick off the sync script-based on the switch to battery? That way it would do its sync, and then power off for the night.

This should be pretty easy to do. A simple shell script will do, file transfer can be done with scp, rsync or unison, playlist creation with command "find" and power off with regular Linux "shutdown -h now". You can also create a menu item for this script, so you don't even need to open Xterm.

I don't see the need of turning the device off when you have arrived to your destination. It doesn't use much battery when the screen is off and it isn't connected to network. I keep the default audio player on pause during my day at work (8 hours). Then after work I can continue the listening from where I left.

it is actually very easy and not really any scripting involved. Install rsync on both your computer or fileserver at home and rsync and ssh-server on your nokia770, make sure to change the passwords for user and root to keep your neighbors like me from uploading mp3s too :P

Ok then you just add a line into the crontab to every 30 minutes to sync with your 770. To work set a static IP for your home wifi connection and tell it to autoconnect when wireless is available. Then the rsync will fail everytime until the 770 is powered on and in range.

Also read the man page but there is a --delete flag which will keep things in perfect sync so it will remove old files or songs not wanted from your 770. Just make sure the source directory on the file server is not larger than the destination (storage card) on your 770.

Good luck and have fun!

-Greg

Thanks for all the input. I am currently shopping for one on ebay as we speak, and will keep you all posted with my progress. A minor technicality that I failed to mention is that the server that holds the MP3's is a Win2003 Server, so I may have to move or find out some way to do it over a samba share.

Sounds like a perfect use of the tablet. I hope you succeed!