Re: [Banshee-List] Seems like Banshee ruined my iPod...

["Andrés G. Aragoneses" <knocte gmail com>]

TLHN wrote:
> So I switched to Linux.
> 
> The only thing I kind of missed was iTunes but I had faith in the good
> people of the open source community so I tried Banshee.
> 
> I plugged my iPod Classic 6th Generation 120 Gb in. Banshee told me that the
> device had to be rebuilt in order to work properly with other programs than
> iTunes. OK - I thought, so I went ahead.
> 
> It went well, I only lost all my album art and playlists from iTunes,
> everything was still there and working properly.
> 
> However, I still had all my music on my computer and I didn't feel like
> messing things up by duplicating every single song by synchronizing the ipod
> with my library on Banshee so I deleted all the music from my iPod (the
> music I once added with iTunes). Then I synchronized the iPod with Banshee.
> 
> At first it looked as if it went fine, all the music was there according to
> Banshee. But when i unplugged the iPod and took a look in the menues I
> apparently only had 20 songs... which seemed very odd since I was very sure
> that I syncronized as many as 5041 songs!
> 
> So I plugged it back in and went back to Banshee, and now I apparently had
> 15 Gb of "other" files, and of course these damn 20 songs.
> 
> I tried to get rid of those other files in every possible way, using every
> possible program om Linux but just couldn't access them. So I digged up my
> family tomb to get this old laptop with windows and a very scary poltergeist
> to rebuild my ipod with iTunes and get rid of all the shit I now apparently
> had on it.
> 
> But that failed, iTunes said it couldn't restore the iPod because it had
> files on it from other programs.
> 
> To summon the whole story; I cannot synchronize properly with Banshee and I
> have no idea how to get rid of all these "other" files. If anybody has any
> idea about how to fix this don't hesitate to tell me!


I'm not sure if you will ever get that so much modern version of iPod to
work with Banshee, but it would be very interesting to at least try it
(since you already said that at least Banshee could rebuild the DB),
giving a lot of information for the developers to try to fix it, as
Chris has already pointed out.

For this, what I would is, in this correct order:
a) First, please, update Banshee to the last version (not 1.4.3, since
master already contains some fixes about iPod synchronization).
b) Update ipod-sharp to the latest version (there's a chance that your
songs were indeed synchronized, but were not localizable by the iPod
normal menus, which may be an ipod-sharp bug that was fixed in trunk; to
be sure you're looking at the correct number of songs in the iPod,
rather use the main option "Random songs" in the main menu, and see the
count there).
c) Launch Banshee, remove all songs from the music library (in order to
have an empty iPod in the next sync)
d) Connect the iPod and rebuild again the DB with Banshee.
e) Let banshee sync with your empty library.
f) Quit banshee.

At this point, I will test this 2 things:
- First, check if you can sync the songs with GtkPod. This is good
information for banshee developers (as sometimes it's interesting to see
how others have implemented things or solved problems).
- Second, with the iPod empty again, try to import your songs in little
quantities (rather than trying the first time with 5000 songs, try with
20, if it works, try with 120, if it works, try with more... until you
find the culprit set of file(s) that may have the problem...).

As you see, open source not only needs the help of developer
contributions, but also users willing to spend time filing outstanding
bugreports :)

	Andres

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