Accessing older Rio MP3 players as an unprivileged user

By default unknown USB devices seemed to be owned by user root and group root on Ubuntu Gutsy and Hardy. This is inconvenient when the device is an MP3 player that you'd rather access as a normal user.

I still use my Rio S50 flash player regularly. After it has had its space boosted a little with an SD card it's perfect for listening to MP3s of radio programmes and podcasts on because it is small enough that it is easy to keep track of what is on it and the AA battery lasts forever.

Anyway, I use the rioutil tool for downloading content to the player. It uses libusb to talk to the device without requiring a kernel driver.

With Ubuntu Hardy the device nodes that libusb uses seems to have changed which broke my old rules. After a little bit of strace I was able to come up with the following udev rules which I placed in /etc/udev/rules.d/45-rio.rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", \
 SYSFS{idVendor}=="045a", SYSFS{idProduct}=="5006", GROUP="plugdev" 

These rules may well work on Gutsy too.

Of course your user must be a member of the plugdev group, or you can specify a different group if you wish.

If you want to make other Rio flash portables work then just repeat the rule specifying all product numbers from 5001 (Rio600) to 500f (Rio Cali).