Lacks sync option for iPod

Thank you for your bug. Could you describe one request by bug only? What would the sync button do? What do you want to "transcode"?

The sync button would naturally syncronize the database on the iPod with the Rhythmbox database (Banshee has a similar concept). Transcoding would be the act of turning in my case FLAC and Vorbis files into files supported by the portable player (mp3), this should be supported to any format gstreamer can encode and any settings the player supports, however it seems to have the mp3 value hardcoded likewise the bitrate settings - at least I have been entirely unable to see what profile it uses by default.

Rhythmbox does do the transcoding, it's just not configurable which can lead to problems, especially since it seems to encode mp3s that aren't playable on the iPod at times (I'm still narrowing that one down, I'll open a bug once I figure out what's missfiring).

it's not clear what the sync button would do. Do you want it to copy all your library on the ipod? Could you open an another bug about the transcoding? That's an upstream request though, do you have a bugzilla.gnome.org account?

Okay since this seems to be hard to convey let's go by example.

The user first hooks up iPod to his machine and copies over everything in the database to the iPod next the user takes iPod to a friends house, picks up new tunes (iPod content is now latest copy of the local rhythmbox database plus the new content from the friend). Now the user goes home, adds some content to his local rhythmbox (say he downloads a few podcasts or something). Then he remembers that he got some new songs on the iPod so he hooks that up. The objective is now to syncronize the content on the iPod and the local database so that both places has new local content plus new content acquired via the iPod.

I am on the GNOME bugzilla

ok, makes sense, that's known upstream on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310774

There's more to it than that actually. Rhythmbox will physically put the files on the iPod, but will not update the DB, and without that you can't play the files on the iPod itself on-the-go until that is fixed. (at least this is true on my new nano that I just started using)

> (at least this is true on my new nano that I just started using)

it updates the db nicely.

the latest gen of the ipod now required the database being encrypted by a SHA1 hash, see http://ipodminusitunes.blogspot.com/2007/09/apple-cuts-us-off.html . this is hitting all media players (amarok, banshee) excepting of iTunes.

they reverse-engineered it, but it may take some time for alternative applications adopting it. my suggestion is to buy an alternative device, the sandisk sansa e280 sounds nice to me.

I'd complete rhythmbox. What some users need is, to sync ratings and play count number, i've found a guy who made a rather primitive pluging to do this.
http://www.kittypee.com/2007/11/16/rhythmbox-ipod-sync-plugin/
And the updated it.
http://www.kittypee.com/2008/04/22/updated-rhythmbox-ipod-sync-plugin/

I opened a seperate bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/292066 that got marked as a duplicate of this but I think they are a little different.

"My" bug is only a subset of this one. I don't really care about play count numbers and ratings - and I think a lot of users agree with me here. But not being able to sync a playlist from Rhythmbox to the Ipod is a pretty huge roadblock.

- Everyone who has a music collection that is bigger than the Ipod cannot simply sync the whole library
- Even if you have a big Ipod for the complete collection, you'll pretty much need to work with playlists.

The situation recently improved with the solving of this bud: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/117925

Because now I can at least create a playlist directly on the Pod and move files from the Ipods library there. So we have now basic playlist support. Still, I have to do double work: create a playlist in RB and try to manually keep a playlist on the Pod "in sync" with the RB playlist.

Syncing a playlist from RB directly to Ipod would be a major improvement IMHO and should have absolute priority over sync ratings and play counts.

Best regards,
Christian

The bug has been fixed upstream now but the code is quite new and need testing, it will not be in lucid but available next cycle

@Sebastien when you see it's been fixed, do you mean the song sync or rating/playcount sync or both?

it will be fixed with the next rhythmbox version but not in lucid, not sure yet what the code in git does sync exactly since I didn't try it yet...

This bug was fixed in the package rhythmbox - 0.12.8git20100602-0ubuntu1

---------------
rhythmbox (0.12.8git20100602-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * Updated to a git snapshot version:
    - Lacks sync option for iPod (lp: #109192)
    - Description of podcast episodes doesn't support HTML formatting
       (lp: #64917)
    - "Do you want to overwrite..." dialogue box lacks yes/no to all and cancel
       buttons (lp: #410999)
    - After one error in radio streaming, rhythmbox fails with all radios
      channels. (lp: #538692)
    - Progress bar while copying to storage media is non-sensical.(lp: #233864)
  * debian/control.in:
    - build-depends on libwebkit-dev
  * debian/patches/02_pause_symbol.patch,
    debian/patches/04_podcast_query_info.patch,
    debian/patches/05_ignore_ptp_cameras.patch,
    debian/patches/06_mtp_memleak.patch,
    debian/patches/07_python-initialization-problems.patch,
    debian/patches/91_git_magnatune_buttons.patch,
    debian/patches/92_git_mc5_status.patch,
    debian/patches/93_git_no_empty_playlist_crasher.patch,
    debian/patches/94_git_escaping_crasher.patch,
    debian/patches/95_git_correct_dbversion.patch,
    debian/patches/96_git_magnatune_genre.patch,
    debian/patches/97_git_no_double_deletion.patch:
    - the changes are in the new version
  * debian/rhythmbox-plugins.install:
    - don't install daap, it requires libdmapsharing which is not in ubuntu yet
 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:51:26 +0200