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

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

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 21:28 +1000, Jonathan Matthew wrote:

> This is something I've been vaguely wanting for a long time.  At the
> moment, I manage files on a CF card using nautilus, but what I'm
> missing is:
> 
>  - Automatic conversion from ogg vorbis to mp3.  I rarely bother to do
>     this at the moment, which cuts down my set of available songs 
>     pretty drastically.  I've been using sound-converter
>     (http://soundconverter.berlios.de/) for this a bit, but it's still
>     inconvenient.

>  - Less important, but I'd like to be able to transcode down to 64 or
>     96kbit.  Half the time I'm using my mp3 player I'm on trains or
>     buses, where there's so much background noise I don't mind trading
>     sound quality for playing time.
Hadn't even thought of that! it's a good idea, but i don't know how i'd
present it in the interface... Also i'll have to have a look at how
gstreamer handles this.

>  - Searching for songs by anything other than 'where did I put it when
>     I downloaded/ripped it'.
Not sure what you mean by searching, on the device? There has been a
suggestion (for devices that support it) arranging songs into folders by
artist. There would also probably need to be an option to keeps songs
sorted as they are. e.g. if the user had already sorted the files into
folders, these folders should probably be recreated on the device.

>  - Background copying/conversion.  Flash is pretty slow and I often copy
>     60-70mb files, which take several minutes to copy, so I want to be
>     able to select everything to copy to a 1GB flash card all at once,
>     then leave it to actually copy to the card.
Sounds good.
> 
> Things I definitely want to keep:
> 
>  - Knowing how much stuff is on the device (file size and play time),
>     and how much space is left
Perhaps for playlists (on rb) specific to a device it can show the free
space and the capacity of the device on the status bar.

>  - The ability to delete songs from the device.  My full library kind of
>     dwarfs the capacity of my mp3 player (can you get 80GB iPods yet?), 
>     so I definitely need the ability to remove songs from it to make space.
> 
> I also use flash cards to copy songs between computers (from home to
> work, mostly), so it'd also be nice to be able to identify songs on the
> device that aren't in the library and copy them in.  There are two parts
> to that problem, and a solution either would be useful.  Not really 
> something to aim for initially, though.

I like the idea of the device automatically syncing to the computer,
copy songs added to the (rb) playlist to the device, copy songs from the
device to some folder and add to (rb) library and the playlist. Remove
songs from the playlist if they have been deleted from the device. 

> That's a really nice idea, as long as I can plug in my USB CF card
> reader and tell rhythmbox the device I use the card in only supports MP3.
> I'd also like the option to treat it as a transfer device (so no
> transcoding), but this is less important.
I'm not sure how to do this. Identifying devices (at the moment) is done
through hal which has a file of usbids that correspond to mp3 players.
Suggestions?

> I'd say it should update the device straight away.  Waiting for me to
> press a button is just wasting time, as long as copying files to the
> device doesn't prevent you from doing anything else.  I'm not sure what
> you mean by "eject the device", but I don't think it should do anything
> that could cover.

Another vote for immediate. That clinches it. By eject i meant "make
safe to remove", but i think g-v-m mounts all storage devices with the
sync option anyway. But it looks nice to see "Removable" (or some such)
on the device to know it's safe to unplug.

> Anyway, this would be a great feature to have, and I'll definitely help
> out testing it once you've got something working.
Sounds good, i'm currently writing up a first version and i'll let the
list know of my progress.

-nick