Sigh. That'll teach me to post on political topics on Advogato. Arguing politics or religion on the internet is the absolute pinnacle of pointlessness. That's why MeFi has turned into such a sump in the last couple of years. No minds are changed, harsh words are bandied about, and hard feelings ensue. I should know better by now.

But enough of that.

I finally figured out how to manage and play Ogg Vorbis files on my Neuros via Linux. It turns out there are a few tricks:

1. You need a recent kernel. I compiled and installed 2.4.22 on my Debian box with USB mass-storage drivers compiled in.

2. You need to mount the Neuros with the "-o sync" option. Asynch updates flat-out don't work with the Neuros. I'm not sure why.

3. You need to encode Vorbis files at about -q 3 or -q 4. I had a bunch of tunes encoded at -q 6, and they would play fine for a bit, but start stuttering and skipping after a minute or two. -q 3 files play fiine. I suspect that the Neuros doesn't have enough horsepower to decode high-bitrate files.

On the updside, the sound quality of -q 3 vorbis files is very good -- as good (or better) than 192-bitrate MP3 files.