I took the daring step of manually updating the firmware on my church’s iRiver T30. This is the device we record all of our services with, and the produce the podcast from.

Out of the box (at least here in the US) this 1GB MP3 player is windows only, and even then pretty limited. When you plug it in it appears as a media device, not a drive letter - so no scripty copying things. This is called something like MTP. iRiver sells this same device in other parts of the world with UMS - which basically means that it looks like a generic storage device. The only advantage of MTP is that windows can sync DRM protected files.

It would appear that iRiver now supports the swapping of the two different firmwares, but when I tried their installer thing it didn’t work. So I followed these instructions instead (looks like that web site has been taken down, I grabbed a copy off google’s cache) - and it worked! It now appears as a drive letter in windows, and it appears as a mounted volume in Linux. YAY! I already have Audacity and Lame installed in Linux, so expect my next podcast to be produced sans-Microsoft!