USB mass storage and rhythmbox problems

[BullCreek]

Binary package hint: rhythmbox

Using gutsy latest:

My music library is stored as FLAC. I have a Nokia N770 that I occasionally sync music to. HAL correctly recognizes this device, and mounts it as USB storage. However, when I drag and drop songs/albums onto it in rhythmbox, a few problems occur:

1. It transcodes music to the device as directed by the HAL config file (which tells it to use aac). However, the resulting M4A audio files are mostly static (you can kinda hear the music once in a while). If I change the HAL config files to use MP3 and re-burn to the device, the MP3s play fine. That said, it seems the AAC transcoder in gutsy is broken.

2. Why isn't there a UI in rhythmbox to set the format/bitrate/extension used for the transcode? Hacking the HAL config files isn't very user friendly, and as far as I can tell, it only allows you to set the mime-type, and not the bitrate, or extension. Having both these latter two items hardcoded by the HAL/Banshee code is problematic. For example, the N770 media player can playback AAC - but it wants the extension to be AAC, not the M4A - and I think it is always using 128kbit, which is fine for MP3, but 64kbit would be ok for AAC. I'd like to be able to specify both the extension and bitrate, in addition to the format.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your report, the second part of your report is known upstream you can track it here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422975

[Chris Hermansen (c-hermansen)]

With respect to the second part of the bug report, the UI requested exists already.

Edit Rhythmbox preferences. Select the Music tab. Then click on the "Edit" button next to the Preferred format dropdown.

Using the editor that pops up, the user can:

* activate / deactivate the support for the format (e.g. turn off MP3 support);
* change the extension;
* alter the bitrate.

It even looks as though by editing the command string a different codec could be used.

I have confirmed that changing the quality for Ogg files produces the desired bit rate upon (automatic) transcoding.

I guess the only other thing I would say is that the functioning of this "feature" doesn't seem really obvious to me.

You still need to edit the HAL config file if your device is not known or the config file is incorrect.