Wanted: Portable Media Devices

Tuesday, July 8. 2008

Wanted: Portable Media Devices

(I'm proxy-posting this for my SoC student, who already posted it on the Amarok blog, so that it gets wider distribution on Planet KDE. Apologies to anyone seeing this twice.)

So iPod support should be pretty well set by this next weekend, and the next thing on my list is support for MTP devices.

So, what's an MTP device? MTP = Media Transfer Protocol, a protocol Microsoft came up with for media devices. Examples of devices that use it? Pretty much every Creative Zen, iRiver, Samsung and Sandisk media device you can think of, which is why the support for these devices is so important.

But I'm at an impasse, since I don't actually have any of these devices. The lack of devices is actually a pretty common issue for the Amarok project, which is where we come to you =). If you have access to a media device which you can donate for development, please let the Amarok team know at: amarok-device-donation@emailgoeshere.com. A list of devices that the project is looking for is available here. This will ensure that the people with these devices are happy people when Amarok 2 rolls around. Of particular urgency to the 2.0 release is the need for an MTP device (see list of MTP devices: here) Any of those devices will be a great help.

And, once I have one of those devices in hand and support starts rolling out, I ask anyone who has an MTP device to check out a copy of Amarok 2 from your friendly neighborhood svn server to help me test things out and make support be good (see: here)

Lastly, thanks in advance to all of you!

Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 23:59 | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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I believe any Symbian S60 mobile can function as an MTP device - simply connect via USB and select "Media Player" as connection mode.

#1 Jarrad Whitaker on 2008-07-09 00:39 (Reply)

I wish I had one to donate. But I can borrow one from my girlfriend, and help with the testing...

#2 ljubomir on 2008-07-09 06:02 (Reply)

That's a big help too, though you'll have to wait until I get a device first... heh.

#2.1 Alejandro Wainzinger on 2008-07-09 06:51 (Reply)

Is this the right email address? "emailgoeshere.com" or is this just an email dummy? It kinda seems like a dummy...

#3 Peterle on 2008-07-09 07:30 (Reply)

Haha, that's what I first thought too. It is quite real however, feel free to e-mail.

#3.1 Alejandro Wainzinger on 2008-07-09 07:38 (Reply)

I have a Sandisk Sansa e280 that I can probably donate. It only puts out one channel of audio (thus it's broken for real life use) but that shouldn't matter for mtp testing. I'll email you guys more info when I get home today.

#4 Andrew (Homepage) on 2008-07-09 07:35 (Reply)

Awesome! Yes you're right, that's pretty much what's needed for development.

#4.1 Alejandro Wainzinger on 2008-07-09 07:40 (Reply)

I own a Sansa e280R. It dual-boots OF and RockBox, but that shouldn't cause problems.

#5 Michael "Wants To Help" Howell on 2008-07-09 13:28 (Reply)

Cool. Maybe with the devices you can solve bugs like this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165037

I don't know if this problem persists in amarok 2. Is there a way to test it without removing the stable version?

My device is not in the supported list from the libmtp site but this is the only thing which doesn't work well.

Thanks!

#6 Rafael on 2008-07-15 19:35 (Reply)

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