Rhythmbox should allow you to sync part of the library with an SD card

Thanks for your report.

I'm not sure thought how you can sync your library with an SD card what do you want to sync? like copy the directories of your music? you can do that by hand, it doesn't seems to be for me like a good feature to have.

Pedro,

Ok, I'll try to make my point. Try to imagine the situation :

John is a music listener. He is constantly getting new music, while purging the ones he dislike, and also hearing some music from his library that he enjoys. He notices that he could listen music while on commute, and then buys a portable music player. So, he copies some of his music by hand to the device, and goes on listening to it.

About a month or two after it, John has downloaded new music, deleted some more, and also would like to copy different music from his library, he is tired of the ones he has been listening for over a month. So he does all that by hand - he finds the music he deleted on his pc, and deletes it on his music player - he finds his new music - and then copies it to the device - and finally delete some of his "archive" music, and gathers some other ones from the archive to replace them.

In order to keep his portable music player with new and fresh music, John has to do this EVERY so and so, and by hand. John could be helped by a computer system that lets him synchronize his library to his portable music player, that can follow advanced definitions such as :

1. Delete all the musics that were deleted on the local library
2. Copy [all] the musics that are [1 month] old on the library to the device
3. Copy a random selection of musics from the library to the device, and limiting disk usage to [90%]

Since John can set the commands, he has lots of flexibility, and always has updated, new, and fresh music to listen to, and he doesn't have to worry about manually handling with files - Ubuntu's Rythmbox does it all every time he plugs in the device and press "Sync".

it's been almost a month, no comments, so I think I should mark this as "new".

I would love to sync part of my library to my 2 gig SD card. My music collection is way to large for that. Plus I mosly listen to podcasts, so having a playlist that I sync would be wonderful

I second this. It would be realy great to be able to sync my SD card with a playlist in Rhythmbox

Come to think of it, it would be even better if rhythmbox would allow for playlists with a limited size, say 2G that could then be synced with my 2G SD card

That's the idea.

And filter by not only the playlist size (in MB), but also the gender, the year, the date added, etc...

I have to boot to windows to make this from times to times ...

I've sent this upstream on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496533

You can fool GNOME into thinking any removable media is an audio player by creating a file called .is_audio_player in the top-level directory of the device, with contents similar to the following:

audio_folders=thomas/music,unsorted/music
folder_depth=2
output_formats=application/ogg,audio/x-ms-wma,audio/mpeg

See http://live.gnome.org/Rhythmbox/FAQ

Correction: you can fool Rhythmbox into thinking this, not GNOME as a whole (not like this anyway).

True, but you still need the whole "generate random playlist and sync to device" action. The "sync" action can be done somewhat by Conduit, but I am not sure. The "generate random playlist" part can somewhat be done by Rhythmbox, but it is all a bit hacky and not very intuitive to use for the suggested use case.

...but is the bug about putting music on an SD card through rhythmbox, or an intelligent iTunes-style synchronization feature that works for all media devices? The bug title and description point to the former, which is already possible in rhythmbox. All the subsequent comments seem to have diverged from the original point.

Thomas,

The bug is about copying musics inside a playlist to an SD card.

Currently, the only way to do this is creating that special file, then selected the sd card and from the tool bar edit->paste (took me a while to find, no other way to do it)

Dinamic playlists are supported now in rythmbox, the only real thing left is to create an automatic playlist in a random order (maybe I should file another bug for this ? )

This bug has been arround for about 1.5 year ... any chance to see if fixed on 9.04 ?

Thanks

I've written a script that uses the Rhythmbox DBUS API to do this. See my blog post at
http://blog.kevinmehall.net/synchronizing-rhythmbox-portable-player

Agreed that this is a pretty basic feature that should be included in Rhythmbox, however.

I also agree.

In short, you can take a look at the "Autofill" feature of winamp.

Music collection in computer is 60GB. Phone SD card only holds up to 2GB. I wanna fill 1.5GB, then how ?

Type in some (optional) criteria to filter the musics and click "Autofill" which automatically remove the musics in SD card and fills with new (random) musics meeting the criteria.

There were three reasons why I am not 100% linux user :

1. Nothing to substitute winamp's autofill
2. Nothing to substitute FL Studio and
3. Games (which can be substituted with a PS3 hopefully).