[Banshee-List] struggling with mtp in banshee

[Nyall Dawson <nyall zombiepigs net>]

Hi all,

I'm currently struggling to get reliable mtp support through banshee. I've got a sony walkman nwz-e436f, and I'm running into a number of issues.

Firstly, running ubuntu jaunty, the libmtp version (0.3.0) fails to connect at all, so I had to upgrade to version 0.3.7. Doing this let me run tools like mtp-detect, mtp-tracks, etc. It also meant gnomad2 and rhythmbox could both connect reliably to the player.

But banshee (both 1.4.3, 1.5.0, and current git master) struggle to connect. Firstly, I ran into this bug 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543938 -  "Banshee says it can handle only one device at the same time."
I've attached a patch to that bug which fixed that issue for me. But banshee stills fails to connect reliably. Most of the time it hangs when trying to connect to the device. Sometimes, and I can't reliably reproduce the circumstances, banshee connects fine and I can copy tracks, make playlists, and everything is fine. Only thing missing is the video source, which isn't displayed for the device.

My latest step in trying to fix things was to upgrade to libmtp 1.0.0, which was released a few days ago. Now, banshee connects to the player on every second attempt (reliably), but fails to correctly grab the track names or playlist names.

And now I'm stuck, and not sure where to go from here. Has anyone got mtp working reliably with banshee? What other steps can I take to try and troubleshoot this problem?

Regards,
Nyall