GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 318737
Support more music players than iPod
Last modified: 2006-01-12 21:55:55 UTC
I'm not sure exactly how this should be done, but I think there should be more support for USB mass storage music players in Gnome. Right now you see iPod stuff all over the place, but there are many other players that are Linux-friendly. Sure, they get mounted automatically, but it'd be nice to have a way to identify/tag a removable hard disk as actually a music player, and then have an option in gnome-volume-properties to "Sync music files when connected" on everything. Or something. ( Personally, I use a Cowon iAudio M3. It, unlike the iPod supports Ogg and FLAC. )
if it's just a simple mass-storage device, then it'd probably be easy to support if you give me the file structure. all I do for iPods is check if it contains a directory named iPod_Control/ at the toplevel, if it does then it's considered an iPod.
Yeah, it's regular mass-storage. Here's the directory structure for my iAudio M3: floam@agorastome /media/iAudio $ tree -L 2 . |-- FIRMWARE |-- Music | |-- A Perfect Circle | |-- Anti-Flag | |-- Aphex Twin | |-- Apocalyptica | |-- Bad Religion | |-- Bob Dylan | |-- Chevelle | |-- Coldplay | |-- Deftones | |-- Disturbed | |-- Explosions in the Sky | |-- Floater | |-- Godsmack | |-- Green Day | |-- In Flames | |-- Incubus | |-- Iron Butterfly | |-- Led Zeppelin | |-- Lovedrug | |-- Machinae Supremacy | |-- Modest Mouse | |-- Mogwai | |-- Oasis | |-- Opeth | |-- Pink Floyd | |-- Plaid | |-- Porcupine Tree | |-- Primus | |-- Queens of the Stone Age | |-- R.E.M | |-- Radiohead | |-- Red Hot Chili Peppers | |-- Sonic Youth | |-- Sparta | |-- Static-X | |-- Stone Sour | |-- System Of A Down | |-- The White Stripes | |-- Third Grade Crush | |-- Tool | `-- Zelienople |-- NED_LIC.SYS |-- PLAYLIST |-- RECORD |-- SYSTEM | `-- CONFIG.SYS |-- TEXTFILE |-- VOICE `-- _SYS Everything on there, except for "Music", is there by default. Maybe it'd be a good idea to try to collect information like this for more devices? I could see having a small database of such imformation being a bit useful.
Now that I think a little more, why are you checking the file structure instead of the devices actual iProduct and iManufacture stuff? Wouldn't that be a bit less error prone? Maybe this is a job HAL should be given (determine if the device is a music player?) Just rambling..
*shrug*, for iPods it works fine and that's how the Banshee developer's ipod library determined this.
Would it be possible to estabilish a "pseudo-standard" such as: if the volume contains the file ".this_is_a_music_player" then treat it as a "generic usb-storage based music player". As of now there may not be a lot of options for using this, but I can think for example of launching a simple sync script automatically. If banshee (or similar apps) would support the "generic usb" as well it would be a great plus: when one of these devices is present it could sync it to a predefined playlist (or set of playlists), simply copying the files to the unit. ...you know, not everybody has iPods :-) (they are really rare in italy, for example, whereas usb mp3 sticks are everywhere). Thanks, Renato
Created attachment 57189 [details] [review] temporary patch hi gals, hi dudes : ) awright you guys, i added support for the iaudio x5. it recognizes it fine and has the option to sync music. the command i personally use is a script i made called iaudio-sync, which asks you if you wanna sync you music. it's been written for my configuration and my hd structure, but it wouldn't be hard to make a configuration file for it. so yeah, if someone is interested in iaudio-sync, too, let me know. but this is about the iaudio x5 support in gnome-volume-manager. and it works fine. the patch is attacched. unfortunately i had little time to make it and didn't hack cvs, but the 1.5.4 source code, slightly patched by gentoo. so you'll probably see a couple of hal and dbus modified line which were not patched by me. but all of my stuff in the .c files is commented /* iaudio */. just keep in mind that i changed that, which is like ninetyfive percent of the patch anyway. i just threw it in to see if it sounded interestin' to anyone, hence the little mess. if it's interestin' to you guys, i can hack the cvs and make a proper patch. but this will totally give ya a clear glimpse of how it works. ciao! : ) edo
I'm not so sure that patch checking for that one specific hard drive is so great. iAudio makes a range of HDD players that all have different models for the drives.
Created attachment 57232 [details] [review] fixed temporary patch awright you guys. i know check a different property which is called 'IAUDIO'. hopefully it's there not only on the x5's, but on the other ones, too. check it out! : ) ciao! : ) edo
as of 1.5.9, g-v-m supports generic music players