Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Support for flash based mp3 players

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 04:07:26PM +1000, Nicholas Gill (mythagel) wrote:
> Hello all!
> 
> I'm developing support for rb to automatically sync a playlist with a
> flash based mp3 player (the kind that g-v-m automounts). I have written
> a prototype as a standalone app, however i think it would be more useful
> as part of rb itself.

I'm currently writing a gnome-vfs driver for the iriver.
Unfortunately, I've been developing it as I find time and it's been
pretty slow progress.

My idea though (and I too talked with DavidZ) is that I would treat
the iriver device as a filesystem very much how usb flash devices
are.  The challenge with the iriver is that it does not use the
USB mass storage driver but it's own protocol.  Luckily someone has
already done all the hard work and written a library which I'm using.

Once the vfs portion is done, I plan on hooking that into HAL so
it pops it as an icon on the desktop (after all you DO want to know
that your device is plugged in right? :-)

RB needs to then know what the devices are.  Using HAL's capabilities
stuff it can tell RB whether the device is something you can sync
and we can automatically add a sync option into RB when it finds
such a device.

As for multiple dbs for each device..I'm not sure. RB's db stuff
is all in xml so it might not be a big deal.  I'd say try it and
see what comes up in your own branch.  The nice thing with this
set up is that we can all play around with what works...

Anyways...  I'll get around trying to do that one day. :)

sri