Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Problems with m3u playlists on device

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan d14n org>]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Ryan May <rmay31 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just got a Sansa Clip+ and am trying to use it with Rhythmbox 0.12.5
> on Gentoo.  I thought I'd document some troubles I had and ask for
> some help on the ones I have left:

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. This part of rhythmbox
doesn't see much use, so bugs creep in and remain for months or years,
unfortunately.

Maybe when I get around to implementing library/playlist sync for
generic player devices, things will improve..

> 1) Device not recognized as portable audio player.  Fixed by adding
> the product ID to 10-usb-music-players.fdi.

I think we need to get this added to media-player-info too. What are
the vendor and product IDs?

> 2) Rhythmbox not creating playlists on device.  This turned out to be
> a problem with the setting of the portable_audio_player.playlist_path
> property to "%File". This seemed to make Rhythmbox angry to no end.

What specifically happened?

> Setting it to '/' didn't help either.  The only way I was able to fix
> this was to remove the property entirely.  Is this really the correct
> solution?

%File should probably work. Maybe /%File? I don't know. That property
has never been specified all that concretely as far as I know. It's
possible that rhythmbox is the only thing that uses it.

> 3) Once Rhythmbox creates a playlist, it refuses to read it when the
> program is restarted or the device is reinserted.  This seems to be an
> issue with the rb_generic_player_source_set_supported_formats
> function, specifically line 1157 (for me anyways)::
>
> 1156                    for (i = 0; i < G_N_ELEMENTS (check); i++) {
> 1157                    if (strv_contains (playlist_formats, check[i])) {
> 1158                            totem_pl_parser_add_ignored_mimetype (parser, check[i]);
> 1159                    }
> 1160            }

This was fixed a while ago
(http://git.gnome.org/browse/rhythmbox/commit/?id=4296f971de1f1661dad8a78dea504b6c6614fef6)

> 4) Finally, the problem I can't really solve (short of using external
> shell scripts).  The m3u playlists produced by Rhythmbox don't
> actually work with my mp3 player.  First, Rhythmbox writes them out as
> absolute paths, and my player seems to require relative paths, even
> though the playlist files are located at the root of the device.
> (Actually, I can't even use this playlist with Totem with the absolute
> paths.  Relative paths make it work.)  Second, Rhythmbox writes out
> the files with Unix path separators (/) and the mp3 player needs them
> to be Windows-style (\).

We currently tell totem-pl-parser to write 'unix format' m3u, but that
should probably be 'DOS format'. I don't think we really know which
devices expect unix format and which expect DOS format. Of course,
from your later message, it appears that there are some problems with
DOS format too.

I'm not sure about absolute vs relative paths, but it probably should
be writing relative paths. We do write the playlist to a temporary
file, but it's in the same directory as it ends up in, so that should
be OK.

> Lastly, once those changes are made, unless
> the playlist file ends with an extra blank line, the last song in the
> playlist doesn't show up. So for example this file, as written out by
> rhythmbox:
>
> #EXTM3U
> #EXTINF:,One
> /MUSIC/Shinedown/00 - One.mp3
> #EXTINF:,Carried Away
> /MUSIC/Shinedown/00 - Carried Away.mp3
>
> Needs to instead be:
>
> #EXTM3U
> #EXTINF:,One
> MUSIC\Shinedown\00 - One.mp3
> #EXTINF:,Carried Away
> MUSIC\Shinedown\00 - Carried Away.mp3
> <blank line>
>
> I realize this may be a totem-pl-parser issue (or at least where I
> need to look), but I wanted to see if anyone had any tips or settings
> I'm missing that could help here.

Probably a mix of rhythmbox and totem-pl-parser bugs.