Amarok 2 and iPhone/iPod Touch

[Nicolas Will]

On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 18:34 -0400, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Nicolas Will wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 14:01 -0400, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> >> Nicolas Will wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 17:42 +0100, Nicolas Will wrote:
> >>>> gtkpod does nothing to mount the iPod Touch, it uses mount points,
> >>>> either over ssh (iPhone/iPod Touch) or from the USB mass storage
> >>>> (regular iPods), AFAIK, but I'm no expert either.
> >> When gtkpod adds files via the mount point, do they show up in the
> >> iPod
> >> player on the device?  i.e. is it still accessing the ipoddb and all?
> > 
> > yup, no problem, music, movies, photos, all goes through properly and
> > show up on the iPod. Amarok 1.4.x had no problem with that either.
> > 
> > The problem is not with libgpod, it does its job.
> > 
> > The problem is for Amarok to know that there is an iPhone/iPod Touch
> > there.
> 
> Sorry, my question wasn't clear.  It was: is gtkpod simply transferring
> files to a certain location on the mount point, or is it interacting
> with the iPhone's database?  (Do you use the iPod app on the iPhone to
> play the music, or something else?)


gtkpod is transfering the files and using the database properly. All
music, movies and pictures show up in the proper default apps in the
iPod touch. That's what I meant when I mentioned that libgpod was used
properly.

You can have that proper behaviour on 2.x firmwares by editing an XML
file on the iPhone/iPod Touch and forcing the use of an old DB version
that uses the old hash mechanism. 

As Amarok uses libgpod too, my guess is that once the proper mount is
detected, the rest should work properly, and that, I believe, is the
root of your question.

> 
> >>> The second one is through Gnome VFS, and I believe that this will
> >> not
> >>> fly within a KDE context...
> >> Well, Solid can enumerate mount points, although I think it relies on
> >> HAL for this.
> > 
> > And HAL deal with real hardware, not FUSE mount points that are in fact
> > very software-based beasts, at leat in the case of SSHFS or even iFuse.
> > 
> > 
> >>   I think.  You could try running solid-hardware with
> >> "solid-hardware list details" and "solid-hardware list
> >> nonportableinfo"
> >> and see if the mount shows up in either one of those.
> >>
> >> There may also be a KDE class for mountpoints...there used to be but
> >> not
> >> sure if that simply got folded into Solid.
> > 
> > 
> > Now you have started speaking a foreign language to me...
> 
> What is foreign about "run solid-hardware with 'solid-hardware list
> details' and 'solid-hardware list nonportableinfo'"?


I thought that those where functions in the code... Sorry.

I have just tried them as commands, and now I know that they are for the
CLI...

Let me have a coffee, and I'll run them and send you the output.


> 
> > Could something in KDE just simply parse fstab? 
> 
> That's the class I was talking about.  Like I said, I don't know if it
> still exists in KDE4, or simply got folded into Solid.
> 
> > Would it be difficult to
> > offer a manual way for a user to point to a specific directory/mount
> > just like in Amarok 1.4?
> 
> Unsure.  A problem with this is that asking the user for mount points
> doesn't make any sense on Windows, and less sense on OS X (for the
> average user).  Really, libgpod should do this parsing in a
> platform-specific way and return the relevant info to library consumers
> in a platform-agnostic way.  Alejandro -- probably something to look at,
> especially if your SoC project gets selected...
> 
> > I understand that what sounds simple and easy in my mind may not be that
> > straightforward in the real world...
> 
> Yes  :-)

I have very little leftovers from the days when I knew how to code,
probably enough to be dangerous.

Nico