MTP connections slow to Creative Zen?

English Hardware
1

I got a Creative Zen (8GB X-Fi version) recently and have had it syncing to my home computers. At some point since then I seem to have done an update to my machine that’s killed the syncing ability. Now Banshee won’t recognise it at all an mtp-detect is slow as hell.

The full-ish story is that I synched at work to a Fedora 11 machine, but the cover art didn’t sync. I then did a few test syncs at home and the cover art appeared, but I was only copying a couple of albums. I started to wipe the player (which could take a few seconds per track or more over 1600 tracks, and which threw errors at times) but ran out of time in the evening and had to do the rest manually from the player. Now when I try to sync or connect the player drops to the “docked” icon for a second before going to a black screen. If I leave “mtp-detect” running long enough then it will return results but it takes a few seconds to return each supported format and the disconnect fails at the end.

I’ve found a couple of similar issues online, but none really help. One is on an Ubuntu ticket where the user wiped their player, re-installed the MTP libs and it worked. Another was a Windows users with the same “screen going black” issue, which was resolved by installing the drivers from the CD.

So far I’ve tried downgrading the kernel (because I know I did that after it was last known working) and downgrading libmtp (just in case the later version broke something) but so far no luck. Whether it’s mtp-detect, mtpfs or Banshee, it all runs slow as hell/fails and the Zen goes blank.

Anyone got any ideas?

2

I’ve just tried re-synching with my work machine and am getting the same behaviour as at home - the “docked” screen comes up for a few seconds before going black.

The only way I can get the docked screen to stay up for any length of time is to let Gnome 2.26 pick it up and prompt me what to do with it but then cancel that dialog and don’t try to browse it.

Given that Windows Media Player will synch from Vista without a problem but three Linux machines with three different kernels and three different versions of libmtp won’t, I’m lost as to what the cause might be.

3

I’ll see if it helps when I get home, but I may have resolved my problems. I don’t know why it would work, but it is doing.

Basically, I used a Windows VM at work to update the firmware from the 1.03 to the 1.04 version. Windows (XP and Vista) could see it fine the whole time, and now my Fedora box at work can see it. Quite why that’s the case when it worked on my Fedora and openSuse boxes for some of the time before the firmware update I don’t know, but it does seem to have fixed it for now (at least on one machine).