Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] MP3 device full handling

[Lasse Bigum <zenith zenith dk>]

I can confirm this being an issue. Actually it seems even worse than
this. Try dragging all of you songs to the device (in my case an iPod
Nano 2nd generation I think) and watch the endless amount of dialogs
popping up notifying you that it cannot write to the device. This was so
bad that RB took up all of my CPU and I had to bail out of X
(CTRL-ALT-F1) to kill RB in order to be able to do something again.

/Lasse

On 16:29, Sun 11 Oct, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> So here I am trying to write a short bit of instructions (complete with
> screenshots, etc.) for my mom to show her how to copy music from her Rhythmbox
> managed music archive to her MP3 player.
> 
> It's all pretty straightforward until she has a full MP3 player.  At this
> point, Rhythmbox is very unhelpful and un-user-friendly.  The problems are
> many-fold.
> 
> Trying to drag and drop titles just yields (usually several) dialogs:
> 
>     Error Transferring Track
>     Could not write to resource.
> 
> Is my mom supposed to know what this means?  Not likely.  But let's pretend she
> does so we can move on to the next problem(s).
> 
> So she has figured out from that very clear error displayed that her MP3 player
> is full.  And, yes, she can select her MP3 player in RB and see on the bottom
> left how much music on there in terms of songs, time and space used (i.e. 594
> songs, 1 day 14 hours and 35 minutes, 3.5GB).  But what does that mean to her? 
> What's a "GB"?  It tells her how much she has used but not a clue how much
> space is free.  Oh wait.  When she bought it, the package said it was a 4GB
> player.  So she has .5G free still.  Why is RB complaining?  You get the picture.
> 
> So let's assume she some how at this point has decided she needs to remove some
> stuff from her MP3 player to put the new tracks on.  But how many existing
> songs does she need to delete?  Oh simple.  The same number of minutes as the
> tracks she wants to add.  Of course to us geeks, we know this is wrong.  It's
> not very easy to even figure out how many minutes the songs she's selected to
> copy takes up, but I will cover that in more detail below... 
> 
> So let's say she gets past the incongruence between minutes and bytes and knows
> that she needs to remove enough existing tracks to free up the number of bytes
> that her new songs require.  How many bytes do her new songs require?  She has
> selected (through the magic of CTRL and/or SHIFT and mouse clicks) the songs
> she wants to copy.  Nowhere is it visible how many minutes, nor how many bytes
> that selection requires.  And that's not even taking into account that the
> result of the transcoding required to meet the MP3 player's requirements might
> be different than the source tracks.
> 
> Yes, she could create a new playlist and put the desired tracks into it to get
> a list of song count, time and space, but again, this does not address the
> issues with pre and post transcoding differences.  And having to add the steps
> to create a playlist and then delete it just to get an accounting is, well, just
> silly.
> 
> So as you can see, there is a huge hole in the usability of RB for the non-geek
> crowd.
> 
> What I think needs to happen is that when a list of tracks is selected and
> copied to an MP3 player (with possible transcoding) an ENOSPC needs to be dealt
> with by providing the user with an opportunity to remove (enough) tracks to
> allow the copy to succeed.  Perhaps something like:
> 
>   Your MP3 does not have enough space to copy the selected tracks.
>   Please choose tracks to delete to free up the space required by the new
>   tracks:
> 
>   <list of tracks with checkboxes -- or some other selection tool>
> 
>   [ ---------------------   progress meter[1] ------------------------ ]
> 
>                                         [ OK ] [ Cancel ]
> 
> [1] The progress meter is a 0-100% and reflects the amount of space
>     needed by the new tracks.  The user continues to select tracks from
>     the list until the progress meter goes to 100% (or more).  The OK
>     button should probably be greyed out until enough space has been made
>     available.
> 
> Thots?
> 
> b.
> 
> 
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