If you install libmtp on Ubuntu 7.10 you get libmtp6-0.2.1 which is sorely out of date and does not play well with my Sansa player. Strangely, MTP in Amarok worked fine in 7.04 but Ubuntu identified it as a digital camera. Since it worked I didn’t complain. No such luck on 7.10. I installed libmtp6-0.2.1 and mtp-detect would segfault about 50% of the time.
The instructions I provide worked well for me but they may destroy your system, make you sterile, catch your house on fire, or worse: accidently install a licensed copy of Windows Vista Home Basic Neutered Edition.
Shut down Amarok and any multimedia software you might be running. In your favorite terminal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
sudo apt-get build-dep libmtp
build-essential pulls in the tools you’ll need for compiling while checkinstall is a nifty tool to build a quasi-sane package for your system. The build-dep command fetches the dependencies required to build the currently available version of libmtp (0.2.1) which for our purposes is good enough. Grab the latest libmtp source from http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=download and save it to /tmp. Go into /tmp and do:
tar -xvzf libmtp-0.2.4.tar.gz
cd libmtp-0.2.4
./configure
make
This should hopefully produce the binaries you need. To make a package:
sudo checkinstall
You must answer questions. I elected yes until I got to editing specific fields. I changed summary and name to libmtp6. This is not technically correct as the proper version is libmtp7 but this makes it install as an upgrade rather than a separate package. I With those changes I hit ENTER to continue. The final step to make Amarok happy was to ln the library it was expecting to libmtp7:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmtp.so.7 /usr/lib/libmtp.so.6
It should be noted that this is The Wrong Way and it will likely rupture the space-time continuum. That being said, Amarok doesn’t seem to need a stable space-time continuum and functions happily for me with this setup.