Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] controlling format/bitrate of transcode to mobile devices

[Jeff Stockett <jeff endlesstech com>]

Actually, I jumped the gun a bit.  Apparently, the N770 does support AAC, but wants the extension to be .aac rather than .m4a.  All the banshee stuff just talks about mime-types but not extensions unfortunately.  Gutsy's /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi has an entry for the N770 that says:

          <!-- Nokia 770 -->
          <match key="@storage.originating_device:usb.product_id" int="0x431">
            <merge key="portable_audio_player.access_method" type="string">storage</merge>
            <merge key="portable_audio_player.type" type="string">generic</merge>
            <append key="portable_audio_player.output_formats" type="strlist">audio/aac</append>
            <append key="portable_audio_player.output_formats" type="strlist">audio/x-ms-wma</append>
            <append key="portable_audio_player.output_formats" type="strlist">audio/x-wav</append>
          </match>

To bypass this extension problem, I just wrote a quick script to change the extension from m4a to aac.  They then showed up the N770's music player, but still wouldn't play (invalid format error).

Just to test, I plugged the device back in, and tried to play one of the files using totem, mplayer, and rhythmbox - only to hear extreme stuttering.  I thought, maybe a problem with the USB link, so I copied a few of the files over to my Desktop, and tried again but still the same extreme stuttering problem.  Seems like the transcode process didn't work right for m4a.  Curiously, when I changed the HAL file to audio/x-mp3 instead of audio/acc and reburned the files to the device as MP3s, they played fine.

I can file a bug in Launchpad against Gutsy for it - but I'm not sure which module.  HAL seems to be doing things correctly (other than choosing the wrong extension for my device, but that may be that Nokia chose the wrong extension).
Maybe it is is two bugs.  One for the transcoding, and one for the fact that extension can't be specified?

----- "Sven Arvidsson" <sa whiz se> wrote:

> With a sufficiently up to date Rhythmbox, you should be able to
> override
> this with an .is_audio_player file.
> 
> See http://banshee-project.org/Guide/DAPs/MassStorageDevices for the
> details.
> 
> In the long run, you should probably file a bug with HAL so it can be
> fixed.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,
> Sven Arvidsson
> http://www.whiz.se
> PGP Key ID 760BDD22