willing to help: NJB mediadevice

[T.R.Shashwath]

On Tuesday 06 June 2006 16:44, Andrew Barr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I planned to do an NJB mediadevice plugin for amaroK this summer and to
> that end, I checked out a copy of SVN and lo and behold someone has beat me
> to it! I took a look at it and even did a quick test drive with my Nomad
> Zen Xtra, and it works beautifully, although what seems to be missing is
> playlist support--at least that's what I noticed. I took at look at the
> mailarchives but unfortunately with the address changeover you guys did the
> archive doesn't go back too far :(. Gmane is down for maintenance ATM so I
> can't search there. I saw some discussion of the NJB plugin in the new
> archives but it referred to pre-changeover correspondence mostly.
>
> Basically, I'd like to help with the NJB mediadevice. I've been waiting a
> long time for this feature, so I'd like to help it along. I've programmed
> in C++ before, and I've used the KDE APIs, but I am self-taught. I'll do
> the best I can though. :) Hopefully I can draw some inspiration on how to
> pull off something like playlist support from kionjb or kzenexplorer.

Hi,

After Andres wrote the initial code, I sent in a couple of patches also. I 
think playlists would be the next major thing too, but there are some other 
things to look at also:

1) A simpler download interface (one which uses the transfer dialog like 
everything else would be nice)
2) Some way to get the device's meta info (owner, etc) and display it on 
connect - I was using the statusbar for number of tracks, but that's a) a 
hack (the statusbar being the wrong place for so much info) and b) 
incomplete. I don't personally like using an active popup, because that's 
just annoying for anything but a serious error or really important info.
3) Direct drag and drop from the device to Amarok's playlist
4) Autoconnect as an option
5) Transcode support

I think Andres got the basic code from kionjb, though I'm not sure, so that 
may be a good place to start. I'm using kzenexplorer as a reference too. 
Another thing to look at is how the other mediadevices are implemented.

These ideas are both off the top of my head and from comments others have made 
on the list and elsewhere, but I think any features at all would be nice. 

For the record, I'm using a Creative Zen 20GB player. I think it'd be useful 
to build up a record of what players everyone is using, and how it 
works/doesn't work with it. So far, I've heard of it working with Zen and Zen 
Xtra, and I guess it should work with anything supported by libnjb, but there 
are things like special features, etc that I don't know about.

Shash
-- 
"Where shall  I  begin, please your Majesty ?" he asked.
"Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, 
"and go on till you come to the end: then stop."