[Rhythmbox-devel] music on external drives

[Emmanuel Beffara <manu beffara org>]

Hi,

I am a happy Rhythmbox user. I would be even happier if I could 
understand and solve a few annoyances that I get with respect to 
external storage.

1.

I have an MP3 player that I also use as an external hard drive on which 
I store a backup of my important files. When I plug it while Rhythmbox 
is running and playing, the interface freezes and CPU goes to 100%. The 
current song plays on until the end, then nothing new is started. After 
two minutes of freeze, the next song starts and the interface is back, 
but the CPU is still at 100% for a few minutes. The entry for the player 
in Rhythmbox does appear in the left pane, and when I click on it I do 
get the list of songs that are on the player. But when I expand the 
line, I get a list of all text files on the drive, mistaken for 
playlists. And all files that are neither music nor text are reported as 
import errors. I tried to put a file ".is_audio_player" at the root of 
the drive with these lines:
	audio_folders=music/
	output_formats=application/ogg,audio/mpeg,audio/flac
but this changes nothing. Hence my first question: Is it possible to 
tell Rhythmbox to look for audio files only in one folder? Maybe this 
has to do with HAL? And is the big CPU usage at the beginning normal or 
is there a problem somewhere?

When I copy songs from the library to the player, the files do appear in 
the "music" folder on the player. This is fine, but I am a kind of 
maniac regarding file name conventions. The convention used by RB is 
"artist_name/album_name/3 - song_title.ext", and my convention is 
"artist name/year_album name/03-song title.ext" (with all spaces). Not 
very different, but there seems to be no way of imposing this, since it 
is not one of the predefined choices. Is there any plan to allow the 
user to specify naming conventions with a custom pattern, somewhat like 
Easytag does?

2.

I also have an external hard drive that is sometimes mounted by NFS and 
sometimes not mounted at all. I use it to store music, videos and other 
data so that they can be shared on the local network. Naturally, I 
wanted to use the music on it with Rhythmbox, so I naively imported the 
folder where all the music is stored. After some time spent analysing 
all these files (9000, give or take) I could play them. First problem: 
all the music that is on the local disk are duplicates of files on the 
external drive, since I use the external one as storage and I copy 
things on the laptop's drive to use when travelling. Then each album 
contains each song twice, which is very annoying, although I do like the 
music a lot...

Second problem: assume I have this external drive mounted an Rhythmbox 
running, then exit RB, then unmount the external drive, the launch RB. 
It does notice that the files are not there anymore, and happily removes 
them from the media library. Problem is, it removes one file at a time, 
removing about 30 per second, updating its display each time. If I exit 
RB, remount the external drive and restart RB, the same happens in reverse.

Am I doing anything wrong here? Would it be better to use the external 
drive as an MP3 player? If so, how can I do that?


I'll stop here for today...
Thanks for the good work (no, really, I mean it)!

--
Emmanuel