Yesterday I've got a Creative Zen. Whoohoo. I did some investigation ahead of the purchase and found out it should work well with Gnomad2. As this is my first MP3-player which is not a generic USB mass storage unit things are not straight foreward.

Creative uses MTP - multimedia transfer protocol - to push content onto the Zen. You have to rely on special tools (Amarok, Gnomad2 or some not quite intuitive cli tools) to transfer your mp3 files to the zen.

Ubuntu ships a version of libmtp which does not recognize the zen. To fix this we can either patch in the USB id of the zen into libmtp or simply upgrade the library. I did the latter. Here is how I did it:

1. Download the 0.2.5 version of libmtp
2. Download the source the the Ubuntu 7.10 version of libmtp with "apt-get source libmtp"
3. Copy the directory "debian" from the source into the 0.2.5 directory you've just created.
4. Issue a "debchange -i" and fix the version number and add a usefull comment
5. "dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot" inside the directory will build a new version of the package in "..".
6. Install the libmtp and the libmtp-dev packages you've just buildt
7. Now do a "apt-get source -b amarok" and "apt-get source -b gnomad2" to rebuild amarok and gnomad2 with the new version of libmtp.

Great. Things should work now. If you get funky "detected a broken PTP header, code field insane, expect problems" you firmware is broken (probably). You need to get a hold of a windows system and install the software on the CD-ROM onto it. Then run the "autoupdate software" from the windows thingy. It should fix your Zen.

If this was greek and you need this to work - please leave a comment. If you trust me (who doesn't?) I'll even put up the 0-day versions of libmtp, Amarok and Gnomad2 I've created. :-)