USB Mass Storage Device Audio Players
Many Digital Audio Players (DAPs) present themselves as a regular USB drive (aka mass storage device) to the computer. Banshee supports all such audio players (including iPods running Rockbox (http://www.rockbox.org/)), though depending on your system, they may or may not be automatically recognized.
If your device doesn't automatically appear in Banshee..
We hope to have a list of devices that people find aren't automatically recognized but that we can tell you exactly how to get working here in the future. Until then, keep reading..
Banshee uses the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) (http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal) to detect which USB drives are audio devices and to gather some basic information about where to place music on the device, what audio formats it supports, etc. If your device is loaded as a USB drive by Linux, but does not automatically appear in Banshee, there are two (related) ways to get it to work.
The audio devices HAL knows about are listed in a file usually located in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi. The most recent version of this file is online here (http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal-info.git;a=blob;h=4a68792f0986ef4121e08b49d7c4fbf6413d2d53;hb=aa5e5b760f28b6e662b8b10137c19bc39a59ef49;f=fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi). If your device is not there, or the information is incorrect, you can edit it (as root, or with sudo) according to the HAL portable audio player specification (http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-spec/hal-spec.html#device-properties-portable_audio_player). You can then submit a patch to the HAL mailing list to have your device included in the next release.
Alternatively or in addition to the above step, you can have Banshee recognize a USB drive as an audio device by placing a file called .is_audio_player in the device's top-level directory (eg /media/IAUDIO/). If you leave it blank, Banshee will use default values for handling the device. If your device puts its music in particular folders, requires music be placed in folders of only a certain depth (eg only one folder deep), or handles formats other than or in addition to MP3, you can enter key=value pairs into the .is_audio_player file, eg
audio_folders=MUSIC/,RECORDINGS/ folder_depth=2 output_formats=application/ogg,audio/x-ms-wma,audio/mpeg
Only those three keys are currently usable. Note they are the same as the keys in the HAL specification (linked above) without the portable_audio_player. prefix.
Submit your information to benefit others..
If your device is not supported, you can help yourself and others by helping us get support for it distributed by default.
If you know how to create a patch and submit it to the HAL list, that's great. But if not, you can still help.
E-mail any information you know about your device to Banshee's mailing list (mailto:banshee-list@gnome.org) (no subscription required). Please attach as a file the results of the hal-device command, eg by entering in a terminal
hal-device > ~/Desktop/hal-device.txt
and attaching the file hal-device.txt that's on your Desktop. You may find this blog entry (http://blog.pcode.nl/?p=176) useful to generate a patch for your DAP.
