Thought about posting this in Software, but then again I'm not really looking for any particular software if what I need to do (manage .alb files mostly) is possible without one.

On Ubuntu I used Rhythmbox to manage my Mp3 player (a Sony Walkman). Now with Slackware I'm trying to keep everything as simple and light as possible, as well as trying to do more manually so my command line chops don't get rusty. I have no problems whatsoever mounting the player or seeing the files on it. What I wonder about though, is what exactly ".alb" files are, as all of the music I put on there with Rhythmbox is in that format. I realize .alb is short for album, but from a linux standpoint, are they some kind of compressed directory? I can actually put normal directories on it as well, and they play fine (but then I can't store album or artist info about the songs), but I'm a little worried they may be taking up more space than they need to be. Also I've found I can't remove them. It pretends I can and doesn't give me any error messages, as if it were successful, but then I umount and turn it on and there the bugger is again!

I still have some more experimenting to do (after I back everything up) but googling these .alb files doesn't seem to turn up anything and I'm quite curious.

I think the .alb are the album art files. IIRC rhythmbox does not look at the album art inside the mp3 tag, but stores it externally. If you are worried about them, you can switch to a wide variety of music players that use the standard mp3 id3 tag to store artist and album information.

1 members found this post helpful.

That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that, but if they are then my mp3 player doesn't recognize them as such. After more experimenting I figured out a way to delete songs. Now I just need a way to somehow attach album/artist information to a track. Right now all my new songs are filed under "Unknown Artist".