The following post is pretty outdated, and while it’s still relevant, I do not use Gnomad2 any more. I prefer other applications such as Banshee, Rythmbox, and Amarok. Banshee is by far my favorite because of it’s simplicity, clean interface and album art support. KDE users will probably prefer Amarok, and Rhythmbox is by far the simplest. All of these devices have MTP and iPod support, and are available in virtually every distribution repository.

Original Post:

If you would like to get your Creative Zen V Plus or related portable music player working in Ubuntu 7.04 and above, you’re in luck!

All you need is “Gnomad2″ (please see updated notes at the top of this post) as the graphical front end to your players music and playlists, and several libraries that are installed as dependencies (i.e. libmtp5). MTP stands for Microsoft Transfer Protocol, and libmtp5 is the key component to making this work.

As of this writing, the Creative Zen V Plus was not added to the libmtp5 udev rules file. This means that you would need root privileges to run Gnomad2, unless you changed the default permissions. No worries… correcting this is very easy to do.

1. First, install “Gnomad2″. The required dependencies will be installed by default.

sudo apt-get install gnomad2

2. To allow access to the Zen player using your normal user account, you must specify which permissions the device should have applied to it. These permissions can be set easily in a file supplied with the libmtp5 package. Edit the file as shown below.

sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/65-libmtp.rules

Simply add the following and save your changes:

# Creative Zen V Plus
SYSFS{idVendor}=="041e", SYSFS{idProduct}=="4152", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", MODE="666"

Note: You may need to verify that the “idProduct” variable matches your device Product ID. To obtain this information perform an “lsusb” after plugging in the Zen player. The output will look like the following:

sudo lsusb
Bus 005 Device 007: ID 041e:4152 Creative Technology, Ltd
<snipped for brevity>

In the above example, “041e” represend the Vendor ID (Creative), and the second number to the right, “4152” is your Product ID (Zen V Plus). If your device is different, simply change the values accordingly.

3. Re-plug your Zen player and wait for it to fully initialize to it’s final on-screen display. Start Gnomad2, and have some fun!

For more information on how to use Gnomad2, check out their website: http://gnomad2.sourceforge.net/

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