So on Monday, Marcus over in the gphoto2 development land committed a monster patch giving MTP Metadata support to libgphoto2.  I’ve been waiting for this patch to land so that I can pipe that information thru to Banshee MTP support, and I’ve got it :)

Screenshots will follow, but as of now, I can plug in my Zen, view a list of the tracks on it including many details (stuff like bitrate and format doesn’t work just yet), I can drag and drop any number of tracks in any format that Banshee’s transcoding engine works with, and synchronize at the push of a button, and the rest is taken care of.  The sync works like a charm!

Gphoto has proven to be a very reliable library, and I will continue to implement more extensions of it into Banshee.  Some of the finer points, such as disk space, battery level, and time sync have not been implemented because they aren’t exposed in the ptp camlib, but I’m sure that it will come soon :)  I also haven’t finished track deleting support as the C# bindings that I’ve been using from f-spot don’t contain a delete method.  This will get done :)

Many thanks to the folks over at gphoto for all their work!  If you have a MTP device and have been waiting for a nice GUI to take care of transferring tracks, wait just a little longer, as it’ll be in Banshee CVS soon :)

It’s been a fun trip over the last few days as I remember my XFCE days as I’ve been getting emails about the xfce-xmms-plugin that I started back in the day. That was TWO YEARS ago now that I wrote my first real open-source program, my first GTK+ program. It turns out that another guy has been working on it, and has vastly improved it…but it brings back some memories :)

I’ve always been wondering how I can make use of the FreeBusy export in Kronolith, and I’ve been looking for a php script to parse it into a simple calendar…so I’ve decided to write one for myself! It’s nowhere near complete and has been borked by this weekend’s time change, but it oughta be cool :) I’ll post a link to my FB calendar and the source for it as soon as I get it fixed with the time changes :)

Has anyone out there seen anything like this?

So, I finally got it working over the weekend :)

Marcus is a genius, and it turns out that libgphoto2 has mass-storage device detection support which just so happens to touch HAL in just the right way that it screws up banshee’s HAL device pointer. I haven’t taken the time to debug this, but it starts working when I remove the disk.so library from libgphoto2_port. SO…for the time being, it’s starting to work :)

Since we don’t have track metadata yet, everything is associated by Title=filename and Artist=foldername…but it is working :) Track write support works like a charm - and once libgphoto2 is ready to transfer metadata with it, I’ll make a release for folks to test things out with :)