Currently Banshee only transcodes audio files when the format of the source audio file doesn't match the target's format. Although this is useful, I believe there is an improvement which can be made to this.

Typically, a media player will have much less available memory than the computer it syncs with.  It would be helpful if the the ripped files on the PC were copied at a lower bitrate or in an alternative format to the device, whilst still remaining in sync.

i see two main ways to implement this....

1. The user drags the files onto the device icon. The files are transcoded
on the fly and copied to the device.

2. Banshee from time to time, perhaps when idle converts some/all of the
library and stores it in another location.  Perhaps taking from the the most
played would be a good idea.  When the user wants a track copied to their
device, banshee checks if it has been encoded already and copies it onto the
device if it has.  Else it encodes the files immediately as in number 1.  Of
course this will not be set to default as some users may not want to
sacrifice the extra space.

The advantage of 2. however is that time will be saved since the files to
copy are already available.

The problem I can see, however, is how banshee is to recognise that the two
different tracks represent the same track.

I guess we could go by filename + extension where the filename must be the
same in both file types.  Another way may be to prescan each media file and
get the md3 of it, making it unique. This could be put into a comment in the
converted file which will be the association between the two files.


+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #531789 +++