Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Ipod plugin enhancements

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 06:50:01PM -0500, david airgeadstudio net wrote:
> Hi Christophe
> 
> On Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:49:11 +0100, Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>
> wrote:
> 
> > The auto-fill is option is something that is often asked for. I can't 
> > remember if someone had written a plugin to do it or not, maybe someone 
> > on the list will know :)
> 
> I couldn't find an autofill plugin on the plugins wiki and google didn't
> come up with anything but if anyone has written one, let me know so I don't
> double up. 

I started working on a patch to allow random selection playlists here:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341249 which is at least
related.. there are some problems with the patch that hopefully I
described in the bug report.  I'm not working on this any more, and I
haven't heard of anyone else looking at it.
 
> > Podcasts is an area of the iPod plugin which deserve some love. Since 
> > I'm not using podcasts myself, I tend to prioritize other stuff before 
> > polishing podcast support :) However, the media type issue you mention 
> > is a bit worrying since the iPod plugin is supposed to be able to set it 
> > :) Which version of rhythmbox are you using ?
> 
> I can't live without my podcasts so I'm happy to help out there. I'm using
> 11.6 (the one that comes with Ubuntu Intrepid). I haven't grabbed the
> latest source yet. I'm still setting up for development. I should be able
> to do a get latest and get it building locally next weekend. From a quick
> flip through the code using the CVS web interface it looks like podcasts
> are set correctly if they come from the podcast component of rhythmbox. If
> you (like me) use an external podcast grabber they just appear as regular
> songs in the media library so the plugin doesn't know to set the media
> type. What I am proposing to do is allow the user to specify a folder in
> their library as a podcast folder so anything transferred to the ipod from
> that folder would be set as a podcast. Possibly something similar for audio
> books as well.

I must admit that I don't really like the sound of this - I'd rather
have rhythmbox deal with externally downloaded podcasts properly, that
is, have them show up as correctly identified episodes in the podcast
source, rather than in the library.

That said, I think this could be done pretty unobtrusively.  The code
that determines if a file being added to an ipod is a podcast or not is
in create_ipod_song_from_entry() in rb-ipod-source.c.  This could be
extended to check if the source filename is under the user's configured
podcast download location.  As long as that isn't the same as their
library location, I guess.