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:

• Looks _realy_ good.
• MTP device works out of the box. With amarok I had to manually configure it, entering device name etc.
• Can transcode when transferring.
• Failed to correctly transcode to mp3, defaults to wav. You don’t want that on a 4 gig mp3 player. should have warned me.
• Adds covers when transferring an item.
• Nice overview of device contents.
• Device content overview is 1. Wrong, 2. inconsistent.
• Banshee randomly locks up, hangs, blocks and Crashes with segfault.
• TERRIBLE SLOW scanning music. But not as bad as it used to be.
• HUGE cpu usage.
• Widgets are all slightly different then from other gtk apps, WTH is up with this.
• Memory usage is decent, around 80mbyte. This is better then it used to be. (but still beaten many times over by mpd+gmpc).
• It crashes, but does not stop running. Sorry if you have a double free error (free’ing memory twice) you should not be running anymore.
• I can drag a song to my music player, but not an album. so I have to select the album, then select all the songs, and then I can move the songs of the album to the music player.
• I see corrupted tags. These are correctly parsed by mpd. (I guess this is gstreamer?)
• more.. but this is enough.

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