[Banshee-List] Rock Box DAP Support Nearly Complete & Some Questions

["Charles Mason" <charlie mas gmail com>]

Hi All,

I just thought I would everyone know where I am at with adding Rock
Box support to banshee and ask a couple of questions. When I say
complete I by no means mean it perfect just that its at a point I will
feel comfortable using day to day and hopefully so will others.

What is working:

1, Reading and Writing the Rock Box DB format which massively reduces
loading times and means the device knows about new tracks as soon as
it loads after syncing, just like the original iPod firmware does.

2, It warns the user when manually syncing, if they don't eject it
properly. This is because the updates haven't yet been written to the
Rock Box DB yet. It leaves the DB in a "Dirty" state so as soon as
they access the DB in Rock Box it will offer to rebuild it. After that
they can sync as normal.

3, Deleting content from the device updates the DB whilst keeping
track of Field usage such as album entries in the Rock Box DB.

4, When in sync mode, playlists are also synced to a folder on the
player. In any mode any pre-existing playlist on the device appear in
Banshee.

5, Artwork is converted and synced to the device. Album artwork is
only synced once per sync, it won't sit there constantly trying to
generate 12 copies of the same album artwork which it will end up
overwriting each time. Artwork file names are modified to match the
rules in the Rock Box artwork spec.


What doesn't work:

1, For some reason during syncing Banshee doesn't think any existing
content matches the content it wants to sync so it all gets removed
and added again every time it syncs. As far as I can tell the metadata
is identical but it must not have the same MetaDataHash. Is there
anything special I have to do, to cause the hash to be generated?

2, Problems with other DAP extensions for iPod users accessing the
device first. I have been thinking of various different solutions. One
thing I can't figure out is what dictates the order the extensions are
to be loaded and therefore which gets the opportunity to map a device
first. I assumed it was alphabetical by its ID, which seems to hold
true. Apart from MassStorage which loads before all the others,
presumably for it to check for the .is_audio_player file. I can't
figure out where its given this priority? Without knowing that I would
have to modify the other DAP extensions with knowledge of Rock Box
which hardly seems like a good solution.

Apart from those two problems its nearly finished. Anyone get any
suggests regarding those problems?

Charlie M