Dear Rhythmbox developers, recently Rhythmbox added device support for the iPhone and iPod touch handhelds which I highly appreciated since I own an iPod touch and now I'm able to put music on without having to use iTunes, thanks!
Before the iPod (or flash MP3 players in general) became popular, one of the most common digital portable music players was the MiniDisc Walkman. Originally, MiniDiscs could only be filled with music by recording from analog or digital input with a MiniDisc Recording Walkman or deck. In order to be able to compete when the iPod was born, Sony added capabilties to transfer music to their MiniDisc Walkman over USB, so called NetMD [1]. NetMD transfers tracks to the Walkman from the PC but not vice versa, using an AV/C protocol from Sony. There are alot of MiniDisc devices with NetMD, however they can only be used on Windows (32 Bit) with Sony's proprietary software SonicStage [2]. NetMD uses the same on-disk format like conventional MiniDiscs. This changed in 2004, when Sony introduced HiMD [3]. HiMD extended the disc capacity to 1GB and used FAT-formatted media together with a proprietary file format to store the music on the filesystem. Like NetMD, SonicStage is required on Windows to fully use HiMD devices with a computer. Recently, we have started the linux-minidisc [4] project which wants to get rid of these limitations and allow to use both NetMD and HiMD devices on Linux and other operating systems with a free software. Since we already have some useful functionality in a library, I was wondering whether you, the Rhythmbox developers, might be interested in writing a plugin for our libraries so that Rhythmbox users can use their MiniDisc devices with Rhythmbox like they already can with the iPod handhelds from Apple. In any case, we'd be very interested to hear your comments on this idea and any input is highly appreciated. Thanks, Adrian [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc#NetMD [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SonicStage [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-MD [4] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc _______________________________________________ rhythmbox-devel mailing list rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/rhythmbox-devel
