2008/10/17 Charles Mason
<charlie mas gmail com>
Hi All,
I was wondering what everyone's thoughts on how best to handle the
choosing of which extension to use when syncing a Rock Box player. My
extension is designed to work directly with Rock Box's DB, however
since a large number of the Rock Box users are iPod users this leaves
quite a complex number of use cases.
Some users may want to use both the original firmware and the Rock Box
one (its perfectly capable of dual booting the player). In which case
they will probably want to use the standard iPod syncing and let the
device update its own Rock Box DB to match. If they aren't going to
use the original firmware then they will probably want to use my
extension since it will access the Rock Box DB directly and provide a
much better syncing experience.
With all the default extensions enabled, when I insert my iPod (which
I am using with Rock Box) the iPod extension loads it as a
conventional iPod, my extension doesn't load. I have to disable the
iPod extension to give the Rock Box extension a chance to load.
There's a simple way to check if Rock Box is installed, it stores all
the Rock Box software in a folder called .rockbox in the root of the
devices file system, therefore if its not present Rock Box can't be
installed.
I could patch the iPod extension not to load any iPod with Rock Box
installed but what about the users that want to use both firmwares and
stick with the conventional iPod syncing. It seems to me we really
need to ask iPod users on a per device basis, if they have Rock Box
installed. Perhaps we could store a hidden file on the player
containing the user choice, so every time banshee detects it, it uses
the correct syncing extension.
What does everyone think?
All Rockbox modified iPod should contain a .is_audio_player file in the root dir. This is needed to tell us things like where to place files, what formats are supported etc. When that file is present Banshee will not open it as an iPod but rather as a USB mass storage device. Does that solve your dilemma?
This would also mean that you would have to lobby upstream to amend their installation guides to include such a file, or you could install it yourself if the conditions are present (ipod plugged in, .rockbox found, model known and has matching .is_audio_player file to reflect capabilities).
Another question might be what we can do to unify the two interfaces in the future. Stock iPod firmware has a much easier layout, relies directly on the db and hides all the debugging entries in the interface. You also have seperate control for podcasts, video and music based on their differing needs. This could definitely be made nicer especially since we already have a lot of information from Banshee that could be carried over. Working with upstream here maybe on a special spin of Rockbox would probably be the way forward.
