So I was wondering if it was possible to partition a harddrive based mp3 player.

I have a used dell dj 30gb 2nd gen mp3 player that I got off of ebay. I love it! The capacity is awesome. I still have 13gbs free!!!

I have loaded most of my pop/rock music onto it. I have also added the majority of my scifi music soundtracks. I have just also started to add my audiobooks on it.

I know playlists work pretty well. The problem is the dell explorer software that came with it was made inactive after installing the last firmware for the player - it added the playforsure compatibility. This is the last firmware for the player from dell and it came out in like 2005 or something. I have tried using musicmatch to load playlists onto it but it seems to choke on my 2000+ songs I have on it.

The player has a "play all tracks" feature that I want to use in random play. That way I could hop from pop/rock song over and over without loading individual artists or genres. However I use this at work and have the speakers pretty low, that makes it impractical to listen to soundtracks with a classical music score because they get really loud and quite too frequently to get a comfortable listening level. It's been hard trying to get a good mix of music while limiting repeats.

The player does let me add artists and albums to an adhoc playlist quite easily. I just don't like fooling with it at work. I just want to pop it on go. What I like about my mp3 cd players is they read the folder structure so I can sit it where I want it to and not worry. Unfortunately I can't seem to read the folder structure on this particular dell model.

What my ultimate goal would be is to have the following layout:

Drive A - Pop/rock music

Drive B - scifi classical music soundtracks

Drive C - Audiobooks.

Is there any reasonable approach to do this? I have checked rockbox but they don't have any hacked firmwares for dell mp3 players. I also don't know if I'd want to risk hacked firmware on a perfectly working mp3 player either.



For one more item I have tried loading playlists using windows media player. I set all my rock/pop into a sync list and then transfer it. HOWEVER the playlist disapears!!!! The tracks are copies no problem but I can't go into the playlist menu and pick a single playlist for the files just transfered.

I read some of the dell sites and it says it supports m3u playlists. In the my computer explorer I can see the playlist subfolder on the mp3 player. HOWEVER it won't let me transfer files over to it!

Does anyone have suggestions for doing what I'm proposing? Is there an easier way to create a playlist on the player itself without recopying all the songs?

Any suggestions are welcome.


---And if you're interested my commute is right around 30 minutes one way. I have taken to listening to my scifi soundtracks on my morning drive to get me perked up. Then on my ride home I put on an audiobook to keep me company -----


EDIT - BELIEVE IT OR NOT VISTA CAME UP BIG! Yep that's right folks Windows Vista had a trick up its sleeve I didn't know about. I had previously been only using my mp3 player on my xp machine. I decided to load it on to my VISTA pc. I then went about looking through the mp3 player. I found the folders and then right clicked. IT HAD A CREATE PLAYLIST option built in to VISTA! It saved it as a .pla file if I remember right. I then copied that to the my playlist directory on the mp3 player and boom! It worked! Now I can go ahead and customize it more and more so I can include just the music I want. Then I'll be able to add my scifi music and audiobooks to seperate playlists.

Hooray for VISTA!!!!!