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dkartaschew
Darran Kartaschew
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gMTP v1.4.0
A basic MTP client for Oracle Solaris 10.
Supports MTP devices including those with multiple storage devices
(typically mobile phones). Supports Drag'n'Drop interface for
upload/download of files.
See INSTALL for build/install instructions.
FAQ
Q. What is MTP?
A. MTP = Media Transfer Protocol. MTP has been adopted by most major MP3 and
Mobile Phone manufacturers as the method of talking to devices to
upload/download files to/from a PC. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol for more information.
Q. Why doesn't gMTP support my iPod or Creative Nomad player?
A. These devices do not use MTP for moving data to/from a device. Apple iPod
uses it's own custom protocol in additional to USB Mass Storage and Creative
devices use NJB.
Q. I have a MTP enabled device and it is connected to my PC, but it doesn't get
detected by gMTP?
A. Most devices are capable of using different modes to talk to your PC, so
ensure that the device is in MTP mode.<br />
A. Or, libmtp doesn't know about your device or how to handle it correctly.
Run '$ mtp-detect' to see if it can be found.
Q. I get asked which storage device to connect to when I connect to my mobile
phone?
A. Some devices (notably mobile phones), have both internal storage
(non-removable) and external storage (removable storage) in the form of a
micro-SD card or M2 card, and gMTP will treat these as different storage
devices.
Q. Does gMTP support Albums and uploading Album Art?
A. Yes. Album data is autocreated/updated when you upload a MP3 (or other
supported audio file) by using information contained within the audio file,
eg. Using the ID3 Tag information in an MP3 file. Once the Album has been
created, you can upload the album art via the 'Edit / Album Art' menu
option.
Q. Will this software work on OpenSolaris, Linux, *BSD or other POSIX Operating
System?
A. I have reports that it runs successfully on OpenSolaris, Arch Linux, Debian
and Ubuntu.
Q. What about SPARC, ARM or other non-x86 systems?
A. It should work fine but is untested. (If libmtp and libid3tag work fine on
your platform, then gMTP should as well).
Q. Do I need root access to use gMTP?
A. On Solaris 10, in general No. (If you do need root access, then double check
your RBAC setup for your user then). On Linux, in general No, as libmtp
should have set your udev rules correctly for libmtp known devices.
Q. In the file view or playlist editor, tracks have a length of 0:00?
A. The length field displayed is reliant on the track data being set correctly
when the audio file was uploaded. Some file transfer utilies do not set this
information correctly (and earlier versions of gMTP are also guilty of this).
Simply download and re-upload the audio file using gMTP to correct the track
data on the player.
Q. I have the same audio file loaded on my device in different formats, but the
song duration is different between them?
A. WMA, FLAC and OGG all store the song duration in header information, and
this is set by the encoder used to create the file. It may be a bug with the
encoder? With MP3 files, the track duration is calculated when the file is
uploaded, so this information should be correct unless you have a corrupt
MP3 file.
Q. The translations are pretty awful or just plain wrong, or why don't you have
xyz language?
A. The initial translations were done using Google Translate services, so
accuracy is not 100%. Please email me with corrections to existing
translations. If you would like a particular language added, and are happy
to assist, please let me know or simply email me with the correct *.po file
with the translations for your langauge.
Q. I'm using French Canadian (fr_CA.UTF-8) as my locale on Solaris 10, but I
don't get French translations?
A. This is due to an idiosyncrasy on Solaris 10 and language translations.
Either:
1. Copy the gmtp.mo file from /usr/local/share/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES to
/usr/local/share/locale/fr.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES, and restart gmtp.
2. or, create a symlink fr.UTF-8 pointing to fr in /usr/local/share/locale
using 'ln -s fr fr.UTF-8'.
French translations should now be present. (Technical information: On
Solaris, the gettext() call will only look in the current locale folder as
defined by the LC_MESSAGES environment variable and not the base language
folder as well for translations, so if the locale is set to 'fr.UTF-8',
gettext() will only look in that locale folder and not 'fr' as well - which
is what the GNU version of gettext() does). This applies to all languages
on Solaris 10. For Linux/FreeBSD uses this should not be an issue as most
will use the GNU version of gettext().
Q. The column view options do not appear to be working?
A. The gconf schema was updated in v0.8. Please update your local schema
file.
Q. I'm attempting to move some files, and I always get an error. What's the
issue?
A. gMTP uses the MTP function 'moveObject' to perform move operations.
However only a few devices actually support this function, and if they
do actually advertise it supports the function, it may be horribly
broken. Basically complain to your device manufacturer that it doesn't
support this function, and that they should add it in.
To see if you device has this option available, run 'mtp-detect' and look
under the supported commands for command '1019: MoveObject'.
The other method I could use is to download the files/folders to your
PC, re-upload them again and delete the originals, however this is very
time intensive, and in these cases it's better than the user do this
themselves.
Q. I have an Android device and .... isn't working?
A. There are a few answers or explanations with Android.
1. Some device vendors have opted to use their own MTP software stack with
their device, and some of these implementations are horribly broken.
Contact your device manufacturer for further assistance. (AFAIK, this is
primarily Samsung with Android 2.x devices, and some lesser known Chinese
developed handsets often rebadged as Carrier own-brand handsets).
2. Android 1.x-2.x doesn't have a native MTP implementation, so if your
device has MTP functionality, see the above comment.
3. Android 3.x-4.x has native MTP functionality, but is missing some
features and does have some bugs in the implementation. Some noted
issues:
a. Does not support albums or album metadata. So you can't upload custom
album art.
b. Some users have reported issues with Playlist support. (Try to get a
newer revision of your version of Android).
c. Android 3.2 has a nasty bug, in that an application is unable to
call the Storage APIs more than once in a session. gMTP 1.3.2 works
around this by caching the device storage information. (but not the
file listing or related metadata).
d. Samsung Galaxy and Google Nexus devices have connectivity issues, that
I'm hoping can be resolved via patches to libmtp. Sorry, there is
nothing I can do about that situation. Complain to Samsung and Google,
and try to get them actively involved in libmtp. Also try the
alternate access method, as this may improve things.
Q. What is the alternate access method?
A. There are two main methods of accessing MTP based devices, either cached or
uncached. gMTP originally only used the cached method as this worked well for
the majority of devices. (All device information including file/track
information was cached in the application for performance reasons). With the
introduction of Google's MTP stack in Android 3.x, it changed many things, in
particular that it only worked well in uncached mode. (Android's MTP stack as
far as I know is server implementation that shares the underlying resource
with the device and the host PC, unlike the usual MP3 scenario, where the
once the host device took connect it was given sole access to the media
storage). Because of this shared nature, using cached information in the
application is a "really bad idea", since you're relying on information that
may change. So gMTP now has the ability to use the uncached mode as well, which
should improve stability with Android 3.x and newer devices that use MTP. The
downside to the uncached mode, is that every action now requires getting data
from the device, which may be painful on slower or congested USB busses...
(I would rather stability for users, and have them wait 0.5secs over an
unstable and poor experience using the application). (Alternate access
method = uncached mode).
Q. What does the "g" part in gMTP stand for? It isn't to denote that you're a
GNOME based application, is it? (If it does, that's lame).
A. While many GNOME applications have a leading G, and likewise many KDE
applications have a K, the "g" actually stands for "graphical", as in:
"graphical MTP", since its a graphical interface for MTP based devices...
Sorry to disappoint people.
TODO List
1. Bugfixes as needed.
2. Further translations.
Notes:
Source code formatting:
$ astyle -A14 -T -p -xg -H -xe -k1 -W3 -j -xC120 -z2 *.c *.h
