Hacking Banshee

Since syncing music to my Samsung Galaxy S3 doesn’t work with Linux (for the most part), I’ve constructed a method of transferring the music over ssh from my laptop to my phone using a cool little program called Unison. The solution is flawless and allows two-way syncing.

One problem, (or challenge depending on how you think about it), is that the playlists that are managed inside of Banshee Media Player on my laptop have to be exported individually and manually to a file when I want to transfer them over to my phone. Having a way to automatically export all of your playlists to some predefined directory would be very helpful for automating my music syncing. After some Googling it seems like no one has solved this problem yet.

I grabbed the Banshee source and started looking over its files associated with playlist exporting. Bingo! Shortly thereafter I found in the file Banshee.ThickClient - Banshee.Gui.SourceActions.cs the method OnExportPlaylist() which has the user interaction for exporting a playlist and the holy grail, the playlist.Save() method call.

The next logical step for me would be to figure out whether this functionality can be encapsulated into an extension, or if that’s not possible, a patch. I’ll definitely be following up on this.