Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Re: portable audio players and rhythmbox

[Peter Robinson <pbrobinson gmail com>]

On 10/19/05, James Livingston <jrl ids org au> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 14:09 +0200, Mattias Eriksson wrote:
> > ons 2005-10-19 klockan 18:26 +1100 skrev James Livingston:
> > > On Tue, 2005-10-18 at 12:44 +0200, Mattias Eriksson wrote:
> > > The biggest problem I see with adding write/sync support for "generic"
> > > players, is that it's hard to tell whether it is actually a simple
> > > mass-storage device, or it's a player-with-a-db that we don't know
> > > about.
> >
> > This is the easy part... the HAL layer will have accessmethod "storage"
> > for storage players and "user" for players that requires some daemon. Se
> > http://cvs.freedesktop.org/*checkout*/hal/hal/doc/spec/hal-spec.html?only_with_tag=hal-0_4-stable-branch#device-properties-portable_audio_player
>
> I read that differently - and though that "storage" would include
> anything that could be mounted as mass-storage.
>
> Take the iPod as an example, it can be mounted as mass storage and have
> tracks copied to it, but that doesn't work because it needs the db to be
> updated. From my reading of that, iPod would have access_method=storage.
>
>
> > > As an example, generic play support should be able to do playback from
> > > an iPod - but writing won't work because the ipod-db needs updating, and
> > > files have to go in the right location.
> >
> > I suggest to add generic storage support for storage players, and then
> > som pluggable backends for devices hal report to have "user" access
> > method. That way storage will work and is quite simple, but ipod could
> > be read-only.
>
> That's what I was thinking, but I'm not sure whether HAL indicates
> whether they are "mass-storage, and just copy files" or "mass-storage,
> db need to be updated".
>
> If it does indicate the difference, that this becomes much easier. If
> not we can still add generic write support, and add special casing when
> people complain that it doesn't work.

In the case of iPods at least I think it detects them pretty well. If
I plug my iPod it gets an iPod icon whereas if I plug in a generic USB
mass storage device I get a generic icon. Not sure whether this is hal
or gnome-vfs2 and whether it actually shares that info or just keeps
it to itself although from what I've read they're trying to handle
this better so they can handle things like music players and cameras
better so we could probably use that effort.

Pete