Banshee Ipod Playlist Support

It looks like the monster might finally start to lay itself to rest. After almost 2 years, one of the most basic feature requests for Banshee looks like it will finally be fulfilled. I’m talking about playlist syncing to iPods. While there have been a plethora of patches in varying states of readiness always floating around, it just never got into trunk. I am very pleased to have checked in a working (and building at the moment) patch which enables the management of iPod playlists though banshee.

I know that the patch has been in better shape, there were a dozen different times that a commit might have made sense, but in the end, ipod-sharp is a moving target, and trying to hit it and Banshee with stable API’s at the same time (without a freeze 😉 ) has proven to be quite difficult (no hard feelings to the Banshee dev’s they keep new features coming, and fast). Anyways, there are a few known bugs with this patch, most of which (in my super-limited testing) stem from ipod-sharp being in the middle of an API shift, and trunk isn’t working.

Anyways, I wanted to make a list of Features and Bugs, namely so the 2 don’t get confused, since a big part of this patch was trying to determine exactly what ‘expected behavior’ was, theres a lot of room to grow.

Known Bugs

• Major Performance Issues – This just needed to eventually go in, and maybe the new ipod-sharp api will have a better solution, but I started working on this, everything (meaning the entire music library) must be iterated over to find a corresponding track. Some preliminary work was done to get more content sorted/hashed, but theres still a lot of work to do here.
• Double Tracks on IPod – Depending on your version of ipod-sharp, and what random steps you take to get things building against your version, there is a common issue where a Playlist Dragged from the Library onto an iPod will result in duplicates of every song in the playlist on the iPod. This should be easy enough to track down if someone just has the time and patience.
• New ipod-sharp API – As there will eventually be a new ipod-sharp API, someone needs to migrate the current logic to the new API, should be mostly the same except for the device detection logic.

Behavior Issues/Features

• A Playlist from the Library to the iPod with the same name will result in the iPod version being overwritten.
• Dragging a track from the library to a iPod playlist will result in that track being copied to the iPod again
• Click and Drag support for playlist’s on iPod, its recommended that you drag songs from the iPod’s library
• Rename of iPod playlists
• Does not synchronize all library playlists to iPod automatically, only those which are placed onto the iPod

I think thats most of it, once iPod support in Banshee has leveled out a little bit, I plan on adding support for On-The-Go playlists and Smart Playlists. Anyways, I know that its far from a perfect commit, but after porting this patch through so many API changes, design shifts, and general bitrot, I really just wanted to get it out of Bugzilla.

The obligatory screenshot:

Note: I’ve tested this with the latest iPod Firmware, if you run the Hash tool as you normally would, it should work fine.