[Rhythmbox-devel] playlists and portable devices

[Brian J. Murrell <brian interlinx bc ca>]

As I documented in bug 631829, playlist creation on portable devices is not at 
all useful.  I am using RB 0.13.1 so I doubt that even moving to the
development version in git will help here.

On my portable device, which wants an M3U format, and playlists put into the 
/Playlist folder on the device, I have populated my .is_audio_player file with:

audio_folders=Music
folder_depth=2
output_formats=application/ogg,audio/mpeg,audio/x-ms-wma,audio/x-
wav,audio/aac,audio/flac
playlist_path=Playlists
playlist_formats=audio/x-mpegurl

When I create a new playlist on my device in RB and then add some songs from
the list of music on the device I get an .m3u file in /Playlists on my device 
with 
the following content:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:,Situation (US 12" mix)
file:///media/ARCHOS5/Music/Yazoo/Only%20Yazoo:%20The%20Best%20Of/12%20-
%20Situation%20(US%2012%22%20mix).mp3
#EXTINF:,Don't Go (Todd Terry Freeze mix)
file:///media/ARCHOS5/Music/Yazoo/Only%20Yazoo:%20The%20Best%20Of/13%20-
%20Don't%20Go%20(Todd%20Terry%20Freeze%20mix).mp3
#EXTINF:,Goodbye '70s
file:///media/ARCHOS5/Music/Yazoo/Reconnected%20Live%20(disc%201)/07%20-
%20Goodbye%20'70s.mp3
#EXTINF:,Ænema
file:///media/ARCHOS5/Music/Tool/%C3%86nima/13%20-%20%C3%86nema.mp3

Considering that the device is mounted at file:///media/Archos5, this playlist 
will work when played in RB when the device is connected, but my goal here is
to create a playlist that the device itself can use to play music while the 
device is not connected to the computer.  Of course, those fully qualified
paths are useless to the device's playlist parser.

Additionally, my device cannot use the URL format of filenames and the URL 
format does not really lend itself to portable relative paths anyway, so it 
seems like a poor choice given the alternate possibilities.

Thots?

b.