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

["Nicholas Gill (mythagel)" <mythagel tpg com au>]

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 16:03 -0400, Damian Christey wrote:

> So are we talking about portable players that show up as USB mass
> storage devices like iRivers, or the kind that use their own weird
> filesystem and transfer protocol?

Sorry, Brain malfunction, i had intended to say usb flash based players,
particularly those that are flash storage based without internal DBs.

> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see why we need to dump the
> files on the computer every time.  If we can read the contents of the
> player from vfs, then we can browse and play its contents without
> copying.

See, these player's capacitys usually range from 32Mb to 1Gb. They are
used mostly for taking a _selection_ of music from your normal
collection out with you.

> Here is my ideal scenario:
> 1. Plug in portable player, HAL does it's magic, and it shows up as a
> source in Rhythmbox (I think the iPod already does this.)
> 2. Select the new source, and you can browse it just like your library.
> 2a. For players like iRiver and iPod that have a database, the db file
> should be read from the player.
> 2b. For players like yours a temporary db will have to be generated.
> 3. Go back to your library and drag a song to the portable player source
> to copy it.
> 3a. There should be pre-copy hooks to convert files for players that we
> know only support certain formats.  Gstreamer should be able to do the
> converting on the fly.
> 3b.  There should be post-copy hooks to update the player's database if
> it has one.

I like this scenario for the large HD based players that act as a music
repository. However (and this is probably just a specialisation of the
above scenario) I am aiming to support the millions of cheap flash based
mp3 players. HDD players should behave differently, as they are an
identifiable collection of music. Usually because of the sheer number of
songs available on such a device, some form of database searching or
sorting is required.

Flash based players are used differently. They are used to take some
selection of a collection of music portably with you. I don't need 8
days of music if i'm only listening to it on the train in the morning.
In that case, i'm probably only going to need a CD or two worth of music
from my collection, and the selection is probably going to change daily.

-nick