Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Portable player support

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:01:34PM +0200, Bastiaan Van Eeckhoudt wrote:
> 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.
> 

May I humbly suggest looking into using HAL for doing the detection
part instead of putting this in rhythmbox proper? HAL more or less
keeps a list of the devices plugged in as well as data merged from
device information files. Such as whether a device is a portable music
player.

Other information, such as what kind audio files the device is capable
of playing (e.g. mp3, wma, ogg) and how to access the device
(e.g. usb-storage or some non-standard protocol where you'd have to
use libusb) can be included. Also, what kind of metadata that needs to
be updated could be included here.

I rambled about all this in the thread where Bastien announced the
iPod support using HAL to detect the device, basically the structure
of what information we tag the device with, the portable_audio_player.*
stuff.

One of the main advantages of using HAL is that the users can download
a simple device information file or even edit their own, and it will
just work assuming that the device is sufficiently simple. And I think
this is important as the market is flooded with every manufacturer and
his brother putting out low-end flash based mp3 players that double as
ubs key storage.

There is already work going on for adding hal support to gnome-vfs and
it would be very easy to change this to display an icon representing
the portable music player. Also, adding support to
gnome-volume-manager is trivial - this would add the feature that
rhythmbox would be automatically started when the device is plugged
in.

Thank you,
David