iPod and generic music player support (was: Re: [mythtv] Fwd: New MythMusic Theme - 4 bins)

Brian C. Huffman huffman at graze.net
Fri Oct 7 14:49:23 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 10:44 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> "Joseph A. Caputo" <jcaputo1 at comcast.net> writes:
> 
> > How are you planning on doing iPod support?  Does the iPod act like a 
> > regular sbp2/usb-storage device, or does it require special libraries?  
> > I've been thinking about this recently, because I know a lot of music 
> > players just present themselves as a simple mass-storage device, so to 
> > add support to mythmusic for these would be just a matter of adding a 
> > UI option in the playlist editor to "copy active playlist to <device>", 
> > with maybe some logic for checking available space on the target.  
> > However, I have an iRiver IFP player, which uses a special library to 
> > manage its contents (I could flash it with a usb-storage firmware 
> > update, but then I'd lose the ability to play OGG on it, which is why I 
> > bought it in the first place).  So, I was thinking maybe the most 
> > device-agnostic way to implement external music player support would be 
> > to just use external scripts that you could customize for your device.  
> > I suppose mass storage support could be built right in to mythmusic 
> > itself, with a checkbox to override and specify scripts to run instead.  
> > Shouldn't really be too difficult.  Thoughts?
> 
> The iPod can go either way.  When you connect it you get a usb storage
> device, but you need some special libraries if you want to read the
> iTunes Database off the device.  You could just read the songs and
> parse the id3 info off the drive if you didn't want to use the
> iPod library.
> 
> Your approach certainly sounds reasonable, having some plugin (be
> it a script or shared-object) to interface directly with the
> device database instead of the device as a usb storage system.
> 
> > -JAC
> 
> -derek
> 

FYI guys, check out the GTKPod project
( http://www.gtkpod.org/about.html ).  That's what I'm currently using
to do all my iPod sync / playlist stuff in linux and it works very well.
Also, it looks like they've recently broken out the library to do the
iTunes manipulation into libgpod
( http://www.gtkpod.org/libgpod.html ).  

It might be useful.

-b

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