skip to content
imo'simo

Syncing audio files to Garmin watch on linux

/ 3 min read

View more blogs with the tag audio , View more blogs with the tag sports
Table of Contents

The problem

I want to upload playlists to my Garmin watch (the fēnix 6), and I found a few ways to do it:

  • Spotify’s app on Garmin
    • Theoretically works, but in practice it takes forever to sync over wifi
  • Garmin Express (the Windows client)
    • Works well, but not on my preferred OS
    • I saw some people running it under WINE, but I wanted a simpler solution

It turns out that you can just copy/paste files unto the watch like with MP3 players in “the good ol’ days”. When I plug it into Ubuntu I can see it as an external drive under /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=091e...b23

You might have to install some mtp tools for the device to be visible. On Ubuntu, I used sudo apt-get install jmtpfs mtp-tools

The external file storage has one folder, Primary, with the following relevant directories.

Primary
├── Audiobooks
│   └── ..
├── GARMIN
│   └── ...
├── Music
│   └── ...
└── Podcasts
    └── ...

Where to put your files

Not all directories behave equally so where your files should go depends on your requirements.

Most times, this won’t be an issue since these devices are not meant to store your entire music catalogue. However, if you want to upload many files without metadata, you might want to look into a tool like MusicBrainz Picard.

For songs: Primary/Music/

You can put your audio files there and group them by artist/album and the watch should still be able to find them.

However, in this directory it won’t be possible to continue listening from where you left off since it does not save the progress.

For Playlists: .m3u8 files

If you want to group some files or make the watch track what you’ve already listened to you can group them using an .m3u8 file ( more info here).

There’s more you can do with this file format (like adding metadata), but for grouping files all you need to do is add the relative paths to the audio files you want in the playlist. For example:

Primary
└── Music
    └── MyPlaylist
        ├── song1.mp3
        ├── song2.mp3
        ├── recording.mp3
        └── playlist.m3u8

Where playlist.m3u8 contains:

song1.mp3
song2.mp3
recording.mp3

For Podcasts: Primary/Podcasts/

When placing audio files under Podcasts/, the watch will automatically track your progress and let you continue where you left off 🥳

For Audiobooks: Primary/Audiobooks

I haven’t tried this yet so I’m not sure if there are any differences between how podcasts and audiobooks are treated.