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BansheeIsAudioPlayer

Filed in: Tutorials.BansheeIsAudioPlayer · Modified on : Wed, 24 Nov 10

The Banshee music player is a decent enough media player that comes with Ubuntu. I use it to manage podcasts: managing foldered music albums or audiobooks is easy enough, but podcasts are a pain to manage by hand, due in no small part to their random naming conventions and lack of tag support for dates.

Anyway, this tutorial is about the mysterious .is_audio_player file. You can make any mass storage device into a device that Banshee (among others) will recognize, display, and sync by placing a file named exaetly .is_audio_player in the root of the filesystem. (I would imagine that Banshee et al wouldn't care too much about the particular filesystem, but I'm sure your media player will want it to be FAT of some sort.) This file contains a few key=value[,value...] pairs that we can use to configure the thing.

The basics are easy enough to find on the Internet, but finding a full description of the format is difficult. After quite some time searching for a formal specification of it, I realized apt-get source is as good a spec as I'm gonna get. Here are the relevant lines from banshee-1.8.0/src/Dap/Banshee.Dap.MassStorage/Banshee.Dap.MassStorage/MassStorageDevice.cs:

  1. name = GetPreferredValue ("name", config, DefaultName);
  2. cover_art_file_type = GetPreferredValue ("cover_art_file_type", config, DefaultCoverArtFileType);
  3. cover_art_file_name = GetPreferredValue ("cover_art_file_name", config, DefaultCoverArtFileName);
  4. cover_art_size = GetPreferredValue ("cover_art_size", config, DefaultCoverArtSize);
  5. audio_folders = MergeValues ("audio_folders", config, DefaultAudioFolders);
  6. video_folders = MergeValues ("video_folders", config, DefaultVideoFolders);
  7. playback_mime_types = MergeValues ("output_formats", config, DefaultPlaybackMimeTypes);
  8. playlist_formats = MergeValues ("playlist_formats", config, DefaultPlaylistFormats);
  9. playlist_path = GetPreferredValue ("playlist_path", config, DefaultPlaylistPath);
  10. folder_depth = GetPreferredValue ("folder_depth", config, DefaultFolderDepth);
[Get Code]

Thus we have (with some guessed examples):

  • name: Tunebox
  • cover_art_file_type: jpeg
  • cover_art_file_name: cover.jpg
  • cover_art_size: 320 (might be size in pixels?)
  • audio_folders: music/,tuneskys/
  • video_folders: movies/,tvshows/
  • output_formats: audio/ogg,audio/mp3
  • playlist_formats
  • playlist_path
  • folder_depth: 2

Note that all ...formats keys take MIME types.

I also found that Banshee looks for a file called ".is_not_audio_player". I guess you add that file if you need to have a file in there called .is_audio_player but it isn't one? Dunno.


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