libmtp provides MTP support for Linux, and has been available for Ubuntu for years.
I gave up trying to use it long ago because I could never get it to support external storage (i.e… uSD cards rather than the player’s built in memory). It might have moved on in the intervening years though…
I’ve used MSC for my e250, Fuze, and now Clip Zip, and it works fine.
Ubuntu has several rippers in its repositories, none of them is perfect. I’m using RipperX on 12.10, chiefly because Sound Juicer seems to be broken in recent releases (hangs while ripping).
I use EasyTAG to tidy up my tags. The Sansa e250 was always very fussy about tags, so my settings are ID2v3, ISO 8859-1, album art 200x200 JPEG, because that is all the e250 would handle. The Clip ZIP might be more flexible - Sansa have had a few years to improve the firmware since I found what worked & what didn’t.
I just use the filemanager to move stuff on & off my Sansa players. It seems easier that trying to persuade whatever music app Mr. Shuttleworth has decided to ship with this Ubuntu version to do what I want it to do…
I hope you get your Clip to co-exist with Ubuntu. I’ve used it to manage my music for ~7 years.
