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Linux, Banshee and mass storage devices

The following was originally written using and works on:

  • Fedora Core 10
  • Banshee 1.4.2
  • Generic USB thumb drives

Updated for:
  • Fedora 21
  • Banshee 2.6.2
  • USB drives, SD cards, mobile phone (mass storage mode)

I use Banshee as my music manager on my desktop. Banshee is the best manager/player I have found yet for my Fedora/Gnome Linux install and so far.
Banshee music player/music manager seems to do a decent job of everything I ask of it.

One quirk I have been bothered by is transferring data to devices plugged in as mass storage. Banshee doesn't seem to pick them up to display in it's interface to allow easy copying of media.

A few minutes on the Linux forums and it seems that adding a file named ".is_audio_player" to the root of the device causes Banshee to recognise it as an audio device.

Being Linux, this setup is of course configurable. In that file (.is_audio_player) it seems there are a few options that can be set to cause things to behave as you want them to.

So, in an effort to get Banshee to recognise my USB thumbdrives, I added a simple .is_audio_player file to the root dir of those drives.

Content of the .is_audio_player file on my USB drives:

folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/wav,audio/mp3,audio/wma,application/ogg
playlist_formats=audio/x-mpegurl,audio/mpeg-url
playlist_path=_1_playlists/


That .is_audio_player tells Banshee the device (a usb drive, sd card etc) can use make use of the types of file defined by output_formats.
The playlist_path is also worth noting. This is where on the device Banshee should write playlists to. I have set the playlist_path attribute in my .is_audio_device file to start with an underscore, meaning when I plug in my SD card to my car my playlists are stashed in a folder at the top of the directory listing so are easy to find. 

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