[Banshee-List] chaching music library contents for removable devices/players?

[Fernan Aguero <fernan aguero gmail com>]

Hi,

I love Banshee, but I have a problem with it. I have a large
collection of music on an external USB disk, that I carry around with
me. And I use Banshee at home/work/laptop in all cases reading the
music from this external source (using the .is_audio_player
file/mechanism). The problem? It always takes a looooooong time for
Banshee to scan the music folder in this disk before I can listen to
my music.

I recently realized (after deleting the local 'music' folder in my
home box) that banshee 'caches' the information on available songs in
the library. Even after deleting the music folder, Banshee would still
list all the songs, albums, etc. And I had to force a rescan of the
library to update this information -- now it correctly shows 0/nada :)

Would it make sense to extend this feature to removable devices, be it
external hard disks or audio players? It makes sense to me ... it
would make all music instantly available whenever you plug your
device. And if your library changed and you want to see the updates,
you only have to manually opt for a rescan.

Maybe this only happens with external hard disks? What would happen if
I bought a 160Gb ipod classic and wanted to play it through banshee?
Would I suffer the same lengthy scan of the library each and every
time?

It may also be a good idea to perhaps do some checks on the external
library (# of files, # of folders) to warn the user about changes and
suggest a rescan?

Cheers,

-- 
fernan