Creative Zen Mozaic on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

Image by ♪ Sleeping Sun ♪ via Flickr

I've just been given a Creative Zen Mozaic portable audio player for my birthday (it's a bit early, but I'm not complaining!). I've had a Zen Micro for a few years now and it's a pretty decent gizmo. Small enough to fit in my pocket, has stood up to several falls, has a UI that gets out of the way and it works with Gnomad2.

Update for Ubuntu 9.10: The Mozaic now runs out of the box, no changes needed. I'll leave this here for posterity.

After plugging the new Mozaic in to my laptop, which runs the latest release of Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty Jackalope at the time of writing) I discovered that horror! it wasn't recognised by Gnomad2. It seems like it's a common problem. The solution is sort of linked to on that bug report, but the help is in French and the file you have to change has moved since that was written. You couldn't make up a better "open source documentation sucks" anecdote even if you tried.

So.. using your favourite editor open up the file /lib/udev/rules.d/45-libmtp8.rules and add the magic lines:

# Creative ZEN Mozaic
ATTR{idVendor}=="041e", ATTR{idProduct}=="4161", SYMLINK+="libmtp-%k", MODE="660", GROUP="audio"

You'll have to do that with super powers, so use something like this to open the file with the correct permissions using gedit:

gksu gedit /lib/udev/rules.d/45-libmtp8.rules

Add the lines right before the first "#Creative ZEN" line that is already in there, just to be on the safe side. This can be derived from first priciples actually, because if you run lsusb it'll say something like:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 041e:4161 Creative Technology, Ltd

Which ties in pretty nicely to the line you have to add to the 45-libmtp8.rules file.

Anyway, after adding that unplug the Mozaic and plug it back in again. That forces udev to reread the settings you have just changed. Start Gnomad2 and hopefully it will recognise your player and list all the tracks on it. Yipee!