Re: [Banshee-List] banshee synchronization code (in-depth)

[Christopher Friedt <cfriedt visible-assets com>]

Patrick van Staveren wrote:
> What do you have planned?  I'm curious :)

Hi Patrick,

Well... the first thing I have planned was out of my own necessity. Just 
an 'autosync' to list.

So instead of syncing to my entire library I'd like to sort out what I 
want in a separate playlist that only references my library and then 
forward sync to that automatically. Right now I blow away my iPod every 
time I feel like updating it (I think that several tracks end up being 
duplicated if only an id3 has changed and I copy them over by hand). 
This would likely involve saving delta information between track changes 
from one sync to another for each DAP.

Then, eventually I'd like to have adjusted iPodLinux / podzilla to some 
degree so that I can delete, or change tracks on the device itself. I 
suppose I'd like to add them too, but to a lesser degree - the iPod 
doesn't seem to be very conducive to that with the interface & 
connectivity. Although I'm sure the iPhone will ... eventually.

With newer DAPs coming out, such as the iPhone, or the Neo from OpenMoko 
having more computational power, networking abilities, etc, it's very 
likely that people will start wanting to be able to download songs 
directly to their handheld and then reflect those changes when they're 
at home on their music library.

So then that introduces the possibility of reverse synchronization. It 
should also be possible to do mixed synchronization as well, although it 
could be slightly trickier.

My plan is to do synchronizations automatically if they're either one 
way or the other (of course fulfilling various predicates), and if there 
are any inconsistencies, to prompt the user with a table of changes to 
select either forward or reverse sync for individual tracks.

The sort of terrifying part about new handhelds having so much power & 
comm abilities is that people could easily start socially sharing their 
music over bluetooth or 802.11 in some massive ad-hoc swarms. Doesn't 
the Zune promise to do something like that? ... Anyways, I can't imagine 
that the RIAA will be too happy when that starts taking over the scene. 
I don't have any plans to write something like that though :)

So yeah...

I'm thinking that in the next 2 months I'll probably have something to 
show for all of my talk. I've been talking about this for a while too, 
but I haven't actually had too much time for anything other than playing 
around with the sample plugin & banshee.db . In the next 2 months I'll 
have a semester break and should have some more time.

~/Chris