Using Elio Photo Jukebox 20 GB mp3 player with Linux

The Elio Photo Jukebox uses the i-river database format from H10 players. It does not play mp3 files directly if you just copy them to the disk. You need to build an i-river database first, using the program easyh10 http://sourceforge.net/projects/easyh10/. It can be downloaded and compiled, it also exist as a binary packages for some Linux distributions. Download and install it now, you will need it a little later.
Requires gcc-c++ and libid3tag-devel (and gcc and other stuff I already had installed). On debian just apt-get install easyh10.

Connecting and mounting the device

Turn on the Elio player while connected to the computer via USB. The device shows up in dmesg as:

  Vendor: TATUNG    Model: elio PJ SYSTEM\P  Rev:     
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 00

It works as a USB mass storage device and mounts as vfat. NB: Mount the entire device eventhough fdisk -l shows some confusing partitions of unknows types.

mount /dev/sdb /mnt/usb

The file system looks like this:

$ ls
contents  easyh10.model  PPL  system  tmp
$ ls system
data  default.img  elio_anim.anm  music  playlist  pp5020.mi4  TMP voice

You can put jpeg photos in /mnt/usb/contents/Photo/ and they can be viewed on the device.

Transfer music files to the player

Simply copy the mp3 files to the /mnt/usb/system/music/ directory.

Playlists

Playlists must be in m3u format. Pls format seems to end up with only one song in the list when converted to pla/plp format. I made this script (looking after an xmms generated m3u file):

#!/bin/sh
# Make playlist for elio player

MUSDIR=$1
DESTFILE=$2.m3u
DESTDIR=/mnt/usb/system/playlist

echo "#EXTM3U" > $DESTDIR/$DESTFILE
for a in `ls $MUSDIR`
do
 BASENAME=`basename $a .mp3`
 echo "#EXTINF:-1,$BASENAME" >> $DESTDIR/$DESTFILE 
 echo "$MUSDIR/$a" >> $DESTDIR/$DESTFILE
done

I call it with

sudo ./make-playlist /mnt/usb/system/music/Guns-n-roses_UseYourIllusion_II Guns-n-roses_UseYourIllusion_II

(no trailing slash). Please note that this won't work if the mp3 files has spaces in their file names. However, create your m3u playlists the way you want to.

Building the i-river database and converting the playlists

Copy a model file from easyh10 to the player's root directory:
```
cp /usr/local/share/easyh10/model/H10MTP_20GB_FW1.00-1.02.model /mnt/usb/easyh10.model
```
As far as I can see, both the H10MTP_20GB_FW1.00-1.02.model and the H10MTP_20GB_FW2.51.model can be used.

Run this script:

#!/bin/sh
easyh10 -C -on -PMrf -e UTF-8 -w ISO-8859-1 -d /mnt/usb/system/data/ -m /mnt/usb /system/music/ -p /mnt/usb/system/playlist/ /mnt/usb/
cd /mnt/usb/system/data/
for a in `ls H10DB*`; do mv -f $a `echo $a |sed 's/H10DB/PP5000/g'` ; done
for a in `ls h10db*`; do mv -f $a `echo $a |sed 's/h10db/pp5000/g'` ; done
cd /mnt/usb/system/playlist/
for a in `ls *.pla`; do mv -f $a `echo $a |sed 's/.pla/.plp/g'` ; done

The H10 player does not use the same file names as Elio Jukebox so we have to rename them. Also, when using a model file designed for MTP players a pla file is generated as a playlist, but the Elio Jukebox is really a UMS player and it wants the files to be named plp, so we rename them.
If you have a lot of music on the player it might be a bit slow re-creating the database from scratch every time you add music. You should be able to update the database instead, using the -U option to easyh10 instead of -C, and copying the database files and playlist files to new names instead of renaming them.

Now everything seems to be running. There might be some details, but I can see the files in "Songs" under "Music" in the menu, I can see the playlists in Playlists, and use them. For correctly tagged mp3 files I can also see them in Album and Artist. I cannot get Genre to work or files I have tagged myself but I might be doing something wrong.

Be patient when removing the USB cable and let the Elio Player reboot in it's own time. It spends the time regenerating the database files and should not be interrupted. If you filled in a lot of music it takes several minutes.

Enjoy!

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Last updated: February 10, 2010