Qball's Weblog

Trying to get music on an mtp mp3 player

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Well My first thought was: Lets install banshee!.

Banshee looks _very_ nice, the music player directly showed up. I could navigate it, see nice stats about how full it is. And here it gets weird. The amount of audio/other reported on the device constantly changes. one time 600 mb audio, next time 100 mb audio and 500 mb others. I have video’s on the device, but they dont show up, at all.

But nothing scary, so I started loading my music collection in banshee.
after 15 minutes and 4000 songs, banshee hangs. Went to #banshee, tried to get a debug log. But that failed, empty.
Restarted banshee, re-imported my music..
40 minutes later, 16000 song done. CPU usage on both cores is 100%, IO is less then 200kbyte/sec. Why this massive cpu usage? I asked on the channel, reply I got: “Then it’s nice and fast.”
Sorry, mpd scans at 15mbyte/sec is finished in only 1/10 off the time, and uses no real cpu time (mostly IO).

But music imported, (after banshee hanged twice again), several thousand songs are missing.
Looking what happened, all the files skipped where flac’s, and I got some weird error about parameter.
These files are known to be good. Channel couldn’t help.

Ok, moving music to the music player, that is what it is all about. This worked, first album copied, 2nd converted and copied and failed. USB endpoint errors, turned out the device went auto-shutdown..
Retry (after turning off the auto-shutdown).
Music nicely converted and copied to device, is suddenly 1/4 of the device full. Banshee converted to WAV and copied it to the device. I couldn’t get it to convert to mp3. (I blame opensuse for this).

So I installed amarok, did some fiddling and am now happily moving music to the music player. I wish it was easier.
Probably going to add covers using banshee again.

So banshee experienced summed up:

I heard good stories about banshee and it looks pretty nice. It has an active developers team (the 2 main developers are payed to work fulltime on it by novell according to the website), it is a release version above 1! and it is buggy as hell. So I am a bit disappointed. I expected better.

Q