::A Geek in Korea::

Last week, after a request to move some music around on my wife’s iRiver H10, I completely messed up her device. I had installed Rockbox, which worked well-ish considering the maturity of the firmware. Rockbox doesn’t support Korean fonts in any manner I can figure out on my own. My wife’s music, being mostly Korean, was showing up as a series of blocks, not characters. It wasn’t acceptable. She asked me to switch back to the original firmware.

Luckily, switching back to the original firmware was easy. There were no signs Rockbox had ever been installed. This is a good thing, because I damaged the music database that the device uses to sort and organize music. Without it, the player was nothing but a Windows-Only paperweight. P.O.S. My wife took it to the after service center and they wiped out her music and rewrote her database to get it working once again. I had made backups of her collection anticipating this, so she didn’t lose anything.

I was handed a blank Mp3 player and told, “Please, put my music back on this.”

I decided that I’d go back to what I had originally planned when I started Windows XP virtualization. I’d run my VirtualBox Windows XP install, mount the USB drive, and use the Windows application that comes with the Mp3 player to manually rebuild the database each time I add or remove songs from her player.

Now, how the hell should I go about that?

First: Install the PUEL version (Non-free) of VirtualBox. It includes support for USB.

Second: Enable USB support for VirtualBox. I followed this guide.

Third: Install the propriety Mp3 database program. In this case iRiver Plus 3.

Fourth: Add music to Mp3 player in Ubuntu. Unmount.

Fifth: Load of Windows XP. Fire up the Mp3 database program. Rebuild Database. Unmount.

BOOM. New music on the player that doesn’t damage the database anymore.

FINISHED!

Now I don’t need to bother with the damn thing anymore, and my wife can get her music with Korean fonts. I’ve gone from defeat and threatening to throw the player out our balcony to mild annoyance at poor Linux support and the number of steps it took me to get to this point. It took around a year, but I’m finally done with it.