MTP-based MP3 player not mounting (Sony Walkman)

[leden]

I need help to get my Sony Walkman mounting as a removable drive when plugged in. This has worked perfectly for my last few linux installations (since about ubuntu 9.04 I think, multiple ubuntu iterations, then Mint 13) but now not working on kubuntu 12.10 when I installed a few days ago.

Expected behaviour: when I plug in, the drive should mounts to /media/WALKMAN and a notification should pop up and ask me if I want to open in dophin or do something else (e.g. play in amarok)
Actual behaviour: nothing happens, though I have been able to get device notifier to trigger opening amarok, and it is visible in amarok; the drive is not mounted /media/WALKMAN remains empty (I created it by the way), it is visible in device notifier but no options apart from my "Manage MTP device with Amarok" one

The player shows up in lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 054c:0327 Sony Corp.

and

udevadm monitor --environment --udev

will echo all the good information on unplugging and replugging

I have now messed around for several hours trying all sorts of things I found in various (old) forums (as this used to be a problem many years ago, but clearly got solved) so my system is no longer clean in that respect (mtpfs, mtp-tools, etc all installed, may need to do some purging?)

Now I have reached the point where I have to ask for help - and ideas out there please?

system summary
kubuntu 12.10 installed on 100GB ext4 partition
kde Platform Version 4.9.2
CPU AMD64 4-core
4GB RAM
2 NTFS HDDs used for data (share with other OSs in dual-boot and LAN)
1 NAS mounted through NFS
1 CDROM drive (seems to work OK)
other USB memory sticks mount without issue

[OneLine]

Thread: MTP Support -> http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...12-MTP-Support

[leden]

Thanks for this.

I am checking some things I found there (currently struggling to compile jmtpfs) and will report there and back here on conclusions once done.

[dmeyer]

That's old. Try the KIO-MTP slave It works amazingly well and hasn't failed me once yet. Look for a ppa on launchpad.

[leden]

That's old. Try the KIO-MTP slave It works amazingly well and hasn't failed me once yet. Look for a ppa on launchpad.

(After failing to compile it) I did find the appropriate deb file by googling "build of kio-mtp" and that installed OK. This means that now when I plug in the device it does pop up in the notifier as "Portable Media Player (open with file manager)", but when I click on it I get a very brief error message "The process for the MTP protocol died unexpectedly" and no mounting takes place. This is back to exactly where I was 4 days ago before I gave up on Kubuntu 12.10 - I since installed Kubuntu 12.04, my thinking being that maybe I needed libmtp9 version 1.3 instead of 1.4 - as this was the version included in previous Mint 13 install where this Walkman still mounts flawlessly. I have also tried 1.5 without any joy.

So I'm still stuck, yet the things works fine with earlier linux installations (Mint 13, Ubuntu 11.04, earlier Ubuntu's too), so something has broken with recent versions. I don't want to revert to Mint as that is broken with other things.

mtp-connect gives this output:

libmtp version: 1.1.3

Device 0 (VID=054c and PID=0327) is a Sony Walkman NWZ-S615F/NWZ-S616F/NWZ-S618F.
LIBMTP PANIC: Unable to read device information on device 5 on bus 1, trying to continueNo devices.

I have also posted at http://sourceforge.net/p/libmtp/bugs/ but no response there.

Any further ideas or suggestions would be very welcome!

[leden]

dirty workaround found, but problem not solved properly

Some "progress" of sorts in that I have found a dirty workaround to force the mount of the device:
- installed VirtualBox and have a Windows XP guest machine
- in VirtualBox set up USB filter for the Walkman (not sure if this was necessary or not)
- "plug in" the device in VirtualBox (by clicking on the USB icon and selecting the Walkman from the list)
- "unplugged" the device in VirtualBox (by clicking on the USB icon and deselecting the Walkman from the list)
- this immediately activated the kde device notifier and now a new entry specifically for "Sony WALKMAN" has appeared (in addition to the "Portable Media Player" entry) with an "Open with File Manager" option - and this option works! (i.e. mounts the device under /media/WALKMAN with perfect functionality, also sync device in gpodder works, which is my real purpose here)

Selecting the previously available "Portable Media Player" entry immediately kills the mounted /media/WALKMAN connection and either generates the same old "The process for the MTP protocol died unexpectedly" or else sometimes it does connect under mtp:/WALKMAN/Storage Media where very slow access is possible, though obviously the standard (I think USB removable disk protocol) is preferable to this (I think mtp protocol) if only because of speed (also the MTP protocol seems not to work with gpodder).

I had actually stumbled accross this solution many years ago when having trouble with the same media player (was forced to use juice under windows instead of gpodder) which is how it occurred to me to try it.

So I am now thinking that maybe the issue is related to the kde device notifier somehow? I'm happy to found found a sneaky workaround but would really like to solve this properly - any ideas?

[leden]

reporting back with more info and conclusions

I installed ubuntu 12.04 (unity) and the device mounts without issue there. As ubuntu 12.04 equals kubuntu 12.04 apart from the gnome/kde distinction, I am concluding that this is a problem with the kde device notifier. I can't live with unity though (believe me I did try, and I do really like kde), so do want to fix this kde issue and would provide whatever help I can to solve it. Can anybody tell me what the package is for kde device notifier so that I could try removing it and replacing with whatever gnome uses? Is that possible or is it so embedded into base kde that it cannot be separated?

I am maybe chasing something obscure (the Walkman is a few years old, but there are still a lot of them about and it's a nice little player). However device mounting is a hot issue again with Android no longer supporting the removable-storage protocol, and I've now found I am getting the same "The process for the MTP protocol died unexpectedly" error for my new Samsung S3, which I thought might replace the Walkman for my podcast listening.

In my opinion we have a bug here in kde device notifier and we need to look at why and how to fix it. Any thoughts?