Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] music on external drives

["Jonathan Matthew" <notverysmart gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Andrew Conkling
<andrew conkling gmail com> wrote:
> 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. :)

This was broken until shortly after 0.11.4. Regardless of the
audio_folders setting or the information that came from HAL, it was
still searching the whole device due to an incredibly dumb mistake on
my part.


> > 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.

What's happening here is that whether the entries are initially
visible is based purely on whether they were present last time, rather
than some combination of that and whether the filesystem they're on is
mounted. It probably wouldn't be hard to eliminate at least one of
these cases by making the initial visibility a bit smarter.

>
> > 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.

This would cause rhythmbox to re-import all the files each time, which
would be even slower, and it would mean you couldn't mix those entries
with entries from the main library.