I think that a library should be developed as a middleware between the media
player and the PMD (Portable Media Device, such as ipods). This library should
be developed in such a way that any media player in any desktop can use it. I am
not refering to windows or OSX here although it could be a porting option. The
goal of this library is allowing the devs from a media player (rhythmbox,
amarok, banshee) to implement one library which allows them access to many PMDs.
This would reduce fragementation and allow linux media players to support a
wider variety of PMDs. For example, my sister has an Ipod which is supported
well in amarok, banshee, and rhythmbox (readonly, I know that write support is
in CVS), but my dad has a zen micro which is only supported in banshee. With
this library, amarok, banshee and rhythmbox would all support the same PMDs
equally well. This would also help devs be able to focus on making their media
player better instead of every single media player having to implement ipod or
libnjb support. This library should probably consist of a core written c or c++
that has frontends, backends, bindings, and file access plugins. A frontend
would be a media player like rhythmbox, a backend would be a plugin like
libgpod, bindings should probably allow access via c, c++, c# and possibly
others. The file access plugins would be there to allow the plugins to use
gnomevfs and kde's kio.

In windows WMP is running a campaign that you can pick any PMD and it will 'just
work'. This could be linux's answer in a way. You can pick any PMD and any media
player and it will 'just work'.

I am filing this bug here because rhythmbox is my favorite media player, and
because this is the only place I know where to put it. This idea might be a
freedesktop.org project, but I cannot code and I am hoping that someone here
will see the value of this idea and make it a library.