Amarok 2 and iPhone/iPod Touch

[Bart Cerneels]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 1:25 AM, Alejandro Wainzinger
<aikawarazuni at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, seems like Solid should be able to poll for mounted volumes (if
> mounted by HAL), the problem is then figuring out whether it's an iPod
> or not.  I don't know what the filesystem looks like for iPhone and
> iPod Touch to check e.g. for the presence of an iTunes database.  I
> want to avoid hacks that will make it work in one case and not others,
> and in particular, i'd like to rely on Solid as much as possible to
> keep it cross-platform for when Windows/Mac get Solid backends.
>
> Doing this manually is exactly what I want to avoid.  Amarok 2 is also
> about ease of configuration.

Here is an idea: extend the scripting interface with mediadevice
discovery. Then you can write a script to mount the iPhone over sshfs
and let amarok know the mountpoint and other info, like that is should
be handled by the iPod plugin. Hide the uglyness of manual detection
and improve the ease of use (no more manual sshfs invacation) all in
one script.

Bart

>
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org> 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?)
>>
>>>>> 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'"?
>>
>>> 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  :-)
>>
>> --Jeff
>>