playlist-gen Code
Playlist generator for Samsung MSC audio sticks
Status: Beta
Brought to you by:
cvine
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playlist-gen
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This program is released under the GNU General Public License, version
2 of that license or, at your option, any later version. It is
distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the file COPYING distributed
with this file for a copy of version 2 of the license.
This program is a utility to enable a playlist to be generated for a
Samsung MSC audio USB stick. It has only been tested with a YP-U6
device, but should work with any Samsung MSC sticks which accept
playlists in Samsung SPL format and keep their playlist files on their
filesystem in a playlist directory named "Playlists". It has only
been tested on linux, but should work on any POSIX-like operating
system.
Note that this program does not disconnect or unmount the USB stick
from the user's computer's file system when the program is closed.
The user must do that herself, using the tool provided by the
desktop's file manager (such as nautilus or dolphin) before the stick
is physically removed from the computer. Nor does this program mount
the stick when it is plugged into the computer. It is for the
desktop's automounter to do that.
This program requires GTK+-2 >= 2.20.0 or any version of GTK+-3, glib
>= 2.16, c++-gtk-utils-2.2 >= 2.1.0, and taglib. If using gcc, it
requires gcc >= 4.6.0. gtk+ and taglib are probably already provided
by your distribution (confusingly, on debian/ubuntu it goes by the
name of libtag1/libtag1-dev). c++-gtk-utils can be obtained from
http://cxx-gtk-utils.sourceforge.net/index.html .
The program (playlist-gen) should normally be started via the provided
start-playlist-gen.sh script. That script should specify the mount
point of the stick as an environmental variable SAMSUNG_MOUNT_POINT,
as the mount point varies between distributions when sticks are
automounted. You can normally find out what that is by executing
'mount' in a console after it has been plugged in for the first time
('mount' executed without any arguments will report all mount points
currently mounted). Both playlist-gen and start-playlist-gen.sh are
installed by 'make install'.
By default, the playlist created by the program has the name
'UserPlaylist', but another name can be passed as the environmental
variable SAMSUNG_CUSTOM_PLAYLIST if wanted: the name provided must be
in valid UTF-8 encoding. The playlist file itself is stored in the
stick's 'Playlists' directory, and the files which are added to the
playlist are copied by the program from the user's computer into a
special directory on the USB stick with the same name as the playlist
but with the suffix 'Files', so by default this directory is named
'UserPlaylistFiles'
The Samsung YP-U6 stick uses the vfat filesystem, and requires any
generated playlist file to be placed in its 'Playlists' directory and
to be in UTF-16 encoding (see further below), which this program does,
but the names of files on the stick are in narrow encoding. The
narrow encoding of filenames which the stick will use when looking for
the files specified in the (UTF-16) playlist is ASCII/UTF-8 encoding,
and when copying files to the stick the appropriate filename
conversion is carried out.
The program also maintains a trash directory in the user's home
directory, comprising the name of the home directory plus the playlist
name with the suffix '-PlaylistGenTrash', so by default the trash
directory is ~/UserPlaylist-PlaylistGenTrash. The trash directory can
be emptied by hand when wanted, or from the program itself.
If, when starting up playlist-gen or after copying files to the stick,
taglib comes across tags in a music file which are not in valid UTF-16
format, taglib will issue a warning to the console. These warnings
are harmless and can be ignored: it usually means some tag information
is missing in the music file.
By way of background information for debugging purposes, the format of
the required SPL file is as follows, in UTF-16 encoding:
[BOM]SPL PLAYLIST
VERSION 1.00
\UserPlaylistFiles\file-name.mp3
END PLAYLIST
This represents a playlist (having the name of the playlist file)
containing the mp3 file 'file-name.mp3' existing in the stick's
'UserPlaylistFiles' directory. The playlist file must have a
prepended BOM marker, so presumably it will accept both big and little
endian UTF-16, but this program has only been tested on little endian
machines. Line endings are in DOS format (u"\r\n").