[Rhythmbox-devel] Portable player support

[Bastiaan Van Eeckhoudt <bastiaanve gmail com>]

Hi,

I got a new portable MP3 player this week, and since the app that
comes with it only works in Windows, I wanted to add support for it to
rhythmbox. I chose rhythmbox since I'm already using GNOME, I saw that
there was some form of iPod support, and I couldn't find any other
Linux music management apps with portable player support.

I started from the iPod code, and I'm now able to detect when my
player is plugged in, and see all the songs on it, and play them in
rhythmbox. Next up is being able to drag a track from the library to
the player.

Now I have some questions of course:

* I checked out the latest version from the main arch archive. It
compiles fine, but I the MP3 importing doesn't seem to work. When I
import a file to the library, the progress bar at the bottom right
says loading for a few seconds, and then goes back to normal, but no
tracks are added to my library. Is this a known bug, or is my system
messed up?

* When rhythmbox is started for the first time, it creates
.gnome2/rhythmbox with permissions 0640, and then complains that it
can't write any files to that directory. I checked the source of 0.8.4
that comes with Debian, and it uses permissions 0750. Any reason for
the change, which is obviously incorrect?

* Starting from the iPod code, it is clear that a lot of code can be
shared for different portable players. The generic code for polling to
see when a player is plugged in, loading the songs into the RhythmDB,
... can be shared, and some interface needs to be defined that each
player can implement. Functions like is_plugged_in(), get_songs() and
some struct for the songs.
Is anybody already working on this? 

All in all it went pretty smooth, even though my C is quite rusty, and
I've never used GLib before.

Bastiaan