[Banshee-List] Guide to getting sony nwz mtp players working (with patches)

[Nyall Dawson <nyall zombiepigs net>]

In case anyone else is running into the same problems I had, I thought
I'd document the steps needed to get banshee working properly with
sony walkman nwz- type players.

First, you'll need to be using the latest cvs build of libmtp. The
patches to make the player behave were commited after 1.0.0 was
released.

Next, there's a few banshee patches which you'll need. First is a fix
to make banshee compatible with libmtp >= 1.0.0, which is attached to
#594191.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594191

Secondly, for some bizarre reason, the check for mtp players is
backwards for Sony NWZ players. There's a patch attached to #543938
which adds an extra check which works for the sonys.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543938

Lastly, the sony's (and at least one other brand of player) don't
return a valid folder to store playlists in, which mean playlists
should be stored in the music folder. Without the patch in #590342,
banshee will crash if you try and eject the player after modifying
playlists on it.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=590342

With these patches and libmtp cvs, everything on the player should
work fine. Transferring music, coverart, playlists, videos,
everything. Every now and then banshee will hang when you connect the
player, but my gut feeling is that this is a hal/udev problem and is
beyond my understanding. Killing and restarting banshee fixes it.

I'd like to get some dev feedback about the patches, and what I can do
to improve them so they can get added to master. :)

Cheers!

Nyall