Philips GoGear
Encyclopedia
Flash memory
Flash memory is a non-volatile computer storage chip that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It was developed from EEPROM and must be erased in fairly large blocks before these can be rewritten with new data...
and hard drive-based personal electronic devices from Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
. The line includes digital camera
Digital camera
A digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor. It is the main device used in the field of digital photography...
s, digital audio players, and audio recorders. The GoGear line is named for the size of its products, all of which are rather small and portable. The digital audio players in the series are primarily designed to compete against the Apple iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
.
Device synchronization
Like the Philips ShoqBoxShoqBox
The ShoqBox is a flash memory-based MP3 player from Philips with attached speakers. Its name is formed from a portmanteau of "shock" and "boombox".The Philips ShoqBox PSS110 has 256 mb of built in memory....
, the GoGear HDD0xx series of audio players are USB mass storage class devices
USB mass storage device class
The USB mass storage device class, otherwise known as USB MSC or UMS, is a protocol that allows a Universal Serial Bus device to become accessible to a host computing device, to enable file transfers between the two...
and therefore support driverless file transfer on most systems; however, files transferred via this method will not be available for playback as they must also be added to a SQLite database. This is done automatically by a modified version of Musicmatch Jukebox
Musicmatch Jukebox
Y!Music Musicmatch Jukebox, a remake of the original Musicmatch Jukebox made by Musicmatch, Inc., is an audio player that manages a digital audio library...
included with the player, but alternative software has been developed to update the database. GOLB and openGoGear are two such utilities for GNU/Linux; they are linked below.
The GoGear ViBE, however, does not need any external device synchronization: no specific software is needed, and adding music files to it is as easy as putting the files in the right directory in a USB mass storage device.
Newer GoGear devices, such as the GoGear Aria and GoGear RaGa use Media Transfer Protocol
Media Transfer Protocol
The Media Transfer Protocol is a devised set of custom extensions to the Picture Transfer Protocol . Whereas PTP was designed for downloading photographs from digital cameras, Media Transfer Protocol supports the transfer of music files on digital audio players and media files on portable media...
for synchronization as well as the USB mass storage class.
Alternate Firmware
The open source firmware project RockboxRockbox
Rockbox is a replacement for the standard firmware in various forms of digital audio players . It offers an alternative to the player's operating system, in many cases without removing the original firmware, which provides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functions...
has added initial support for the GoGear SA9200 series, and runs well on the HDD16x0 and HDD63x0 series.