Linux, Android, Banshee and file systems

I recently signed up to a new mobile contract, which came with a shiny new Xperia Z1 Android phone. The phone has been greate so far in the couple of months I've had it, but I've just encounted my first real irritation.

Trying to get Banshee to sync music to the SD card in phone is proving tricky. When I run the sync I get bucket loads of errors in the Banshee log:

"Error setting permissions: Function not implemented"

So I figure this must be a filesystem issue and formatted the card into NTFS, where I have had success in the past. Then when I reboot the phone it sees the card format as NTFS and wont let me use it without formatting it back to exFAT.

It seems the phone REALLY wants the SD card to be formatted in exFAT!

Before I got to this point I had to persuade my Fedora 20 system to mount the xperia z1 phone via a USB cable. At first it wouldn't recognise the card, but installing of two packages (fuse-exfat and exfat-utils) seem to sort that.

The system file explorer could copy files back and forth quite happily, so that works. It's just Banshee that's having issues with this exFAT SD card.

I closed Banshee as a bad job while I did some Googling, when I reopened Banshee I discovered the file count shown for the SD card had increased. It seems Banshee had managed to copy my music over despite lots of misleading errors.

So while I don't know how to stop those errors about not being able to set the permissions, it seems Banshee is actually doing what I want.

In case you are wondering, it turns out exFAT is a Microsoft proprietry filesystem they are hawking as the filesystem of choice for larger capacity memory cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

Banshee 2 way sync

Anyone out there able to help get 2 way sync working properly in Banshee 2.0.1 on Fedora 15?

Here is my situation, 2 PCs and a USB thumbdrive. I want to be able to use the thumbdrive to sync the 2 PCs, the thumbdrive also gets used in the car.

So if I buy some music via the Banshee Amazon plugin on one machine, sync to the thumbdrive I then want that file to automatically find its way into the library on machine two during a sync. Likewise if I tweak some meta data or set a rating on a track on one machine I want those changes to be reflected on the other machine after syncing.

If my thumbdrive contains a subset of my collection (eg a playlist) I don't want the sync to assume that means that all those that aren't on the thumbdrive should be deleted from the PC as happened today (thankfully I do semi regular backups!)!

Perhaps the answer is to maintain a playlist on each machine for the thumbdrive and sync the drive/playlist together rather than the library, would that import new tracks and data into main library while not deleting 'missing' tracks from the PC?