Saturday 28 March 2009

Hurrah for Nokia!

Here's me, sat at home. Knowing at some point if I am to use my shiny new Nokia N85 for music at the gym etc I am going to have to spend some time fiddling to get my Nokia and Banshee talking nicely.

So I try plugging in that little USB cable to see if Linux recognises a mass storage device. Not only is it recognised but Banshee instantly adds the phone as a writable device for syncing my music.

Wow!

No tinkering at all needed. Not sure who's done the work or whether it's just that Nokia have followed the same protocol standards as the Banshee coders did, but either way I'm very happy I don't have to spend ages getting it to work.
Only ages to sync it all!

Friday 20 March 2009

Banshee 1.4.2 problem with flash drive

Since upgrading to FC10, the Banshee install I have has been refusing to write to my generic USB sticks.

When transferring tracks, using the Banshee interface, to my USB drive I was getting an error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".

While I have a reasonable grasp what the error means from a coding perspective, I don't have the time nor the inclination to dig into the source code. Nor would the average non-coder trying to move to Linux have any idea.

Turns out that a fix found here:

http://blog.hyperandy.com/2009/01/20/banshee-141-object-reference-not-set-to-an-instance-of-an-object-error-fix/#comment-4224

Sorted out my problem nicely.

I added output_formats=audio/mp3 to the .is_audio_player file on the USB device and I can now copy my tunes for the car and I'm a happy raver once again :)

Apparently this is something to do with telling Banshe the device supports mp3 format audio and not to bother re-encoding for the device.