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On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, bad apple wrote:
On 05/01/12 19:59, Gordon Henderson wrote:Thanks chaps. Ok. Debian stable has clementine 5.3 and libgpod4 is already there (for Banshee, presumably), so ... The iPod is an old 8GB nano which did mostly work with banshee, but I think it was banshee that was letting it down more than anything else, and anyway, it will be replaced soon as soon with a non-apple mo3 player as we're done wnough due diligence to work out which is the right one... But... I just wish there wasn't this push to make everything do everything... She has no need for a "player" application that also sings, dances, talks to ipods, etc... What ever happened to the unix principle - do one thing and do it well... Needed: A program to keep track of podcasts from the BBC and elsewhere, and download them as required. A program that syncs the local images with mp3 player. (bonus if it undestands apples whacky filesystem/database) How hard can it be... Will let you know how we get on... Cheers, GordonIt's 2012 my friend - all the small single use Unix tools are still there under the hood, modern frontends are just wrappers for them!
Yes. I have been doing this for quite some time ...
You'd be pretty pissed
No, I'd be pissed off rather than drunk...
if managing your music directory involved filtering the contents into a SQL database and then piping select queries into filesystem calls everytime you wanted to sync a playlist...
Flat files are far more efficient for the quantity of music I have, and what's wrong with simply having the filenames as the track name?
However, many more issues here - the biggest one being that I don't listen to music/podcast/video, etc. and I don't own a "pod" of any kind. If I did then I'd be up on the various technologys to do so. I simply have no interst in them whatsoever.
get_iplayer will handle all your BBC needs, it's like a scriptable PVR (and you can control file output with "modes=flashvhigh,flashstd" etc: optionally use ffmpeg to further encode and cron to schedule) for looting the BBC back catalogue.
VLC works on my workstation to play video, and uknova gets me most of the TV I miss. I used to use get_iplayer but it stopped working for me, even though I got the latest one and I couldn't be arsed working out why because uknova fills the gap.
Simon's right about rsync although that's kind of obvious: as long as the correct libraries are installed to handle mounting Apple's "whacky" crap any normal tool will work transparently over the top of it. If you don't want to do a relatively simple sync between files and iPod though it's not exactly the best tool for the job.
Yes. I know about rsync, my wife doesn't. She's not a geek, she's a user, and when things don't work she whinges. And rightly so. It's also possible that Debian stable might not be the best distribution for her, but it's what I've been using mostly since forever.
But I was under the impression that iPods had more than just a simple file system with some internal database? If simply plugging them in and copying files to them works then I wonder why people have gone to the effort of writing banshee/clementine, etc.... (This is why I wonder how hard it can be)
Update from the wife: You have to use Banshee and Clementine together - Banshee to get the podcasts and clementine to send them to the iPod. Seems bizarre to me but what do I know - if it's working for her...
2nd update: "Things are whizzing round on my iPod" which it's not done for a long time apparently...
3rd update - it's not working. Clementine shows the files as being on the iPod, but the iPod refuses to see them when unplugged.
4th update - it's sort of working, but it's put podcasts into the music folder...
It's not entirely impossible that the iPod is broken in some way. I did suggest that she factory reset it, but the seemed to upset Banshee. She was able to successfully use Banshee initially - it only stopped working in recent weeks.
So back to putting her old Windows XP box back together just so she can run iTunes again. I was about to wipe it and sell it too...
I'm hoping these issues will really go away when she gets a non apple device. Actually, I might try it with my phone - it ought to be generic enough to use as a testbed. (Not that I ever have music on my phone, but it's worth a try)
A further heads-up: unusually for me I hadn't noticed that clementine has massively updated and is now at stable version 1.0, but it doesn't seem to have filtered down to any distro's package management system yet so get it directly from http://www.clementine-player.org/downloads. There are builds for windows, mac, debian/ubuntu and fedora + source for unfortunates like me with ultra-conservative enterprise distros. Even though you're on Debian you could probably just safely use the PPA - not normally recommended I know, but it's only a small single purpose PPA so you should get away with it (I've just tried this on Debian Squeeze and it worked fine).
What's a PPA? (Google is retuning too many hits that don't mean anything in this context)
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq