Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] music on external drives

["Andrew Conkling" <andrew conkling gmail com>]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Emmanuel Beffara <manu beffara org> wrote:

I have an MP3 player that I also use as an external hard drive on which
I store a backup of my important files. When I plug it while Rhythmbox
is running and playing, the interface freezes and CPU goes to 100%. The
current song plays on until the end, then nothing new is started. After
two minutes of freeze, the next song starts and the interface is back,
but the CPU is still at 100% for a few minutes. The entry for the player
in Rhythmbox does appear in the left pane, and when I click on it I do
get the list of songs that are on the player. But when I expand the
line, I get a list of all text files on the drive, mistaken for
playlists. And all files that are neither music nor text are reported as
import errors. I tried to put a file ".is_audio_player" at the root of
the drive with these lines:
       audio_folders=music/
       output_formats=application/ogg,audio/mpeg,audio/flac
but this changes nothing. Hence my first question: Is it possible to
tell Rhythmbox to look for audio files only in one folder? Maybe this
has to do with HAL? And is the big CPU usage at the beginning normal or
is there a problem somewhere?

I've noticed the same with my iAUDIO X5. I will actually close Rhythmbox before connecting it to the computer. HAL is configured to only look for music in the Music folder of the device, so I assume Rhythmbox is doing that too, but I notice the same behavior. (I've been meaning to reach out and send a message like yours. :)

I also have an external hard drive that is sometimes mounted by NFS and
sometimes not mounted at all. I use it to store music, videos and other
data so that they can be shared on the local network. Naturally, I
wanted to use the music on it with Rhythmbox, so I naively imported the
folder where all the music is stored. After some time spent analysing
all these files (9000, give or take) I could play them. First problem:
all the music that is on the local disk are duplicates of files on the
external drive, since I use the external one as storage and I copy
things on the laptop's drive to use when travelling. Then each album
contains each song twice, which is very annoying, although I do like the
music a lot...

I have a similar set up (a remote drive mounted via NFS) and I actually mounted the NFS drive over my music folder. So when I'm not on my home network, RB just sees my local music, but when I'm home, the rest automagically shows up again. Maybe that would work for you?

Second problem: assume I have this external drive mounted an Rhythmbox
running, then exit RB, then unmount the external drive, the launch RB.
It does notice that the files are not there anymore, and happily removes
them from the media library. Problem is, it removes one file at a time,
removing about 30 per second, updating its display each time. If I exit
RB, remount the external drive and restart RB, the same happens in reverse.

That's normal; RB re-scans the library in the background when it starts up. If you turn on library monitoring in the Preferences, it will actually do this real-time.

Am I doing anything wrong here? Would it be better to use the external
drive as an MP3 player? If so, how can I do that?

You may be able to do the .is_audio_player stuff you mentioned above to force it to be detected as an audio player, but I don't know how well that would work. Nor would I suggest it in your case; it seems like you're doing everything right.

Cheers,
Andrew