Podcasts in Rhythmbox: removing special characters from the downloaded files

When Rhythmbox downloads podcasts, it uses the URL as a filename. I like to copy/paste the podcasts to my mp3 player with Nautilus. Unfortunately, my mp3 player has trouble with special characters like colons and question marks (':' and '?'). This is probably due to the FAT32 file system.

I use the following script (triggered from a launcher) to remove those chars from my podcasts:

#!/bin/bash
find $HOME/Desktop/downloads/ | while read f
do
  REN="$(echo "$f" | tr ":" "_" | cut -d '?' -f 1)"
  echo "mv $f $REN"
  mv "$f" "$REN"
done

After that, copy/paste of my podcasts goes fine.

Rhythmbox meets MP3 players

As stated in my previous post, FireFly is now serving my personal music collection from the CH3WNAS. This is nice for live streaming songs to Rhythmbox, but I also want to put some mp3s on my mp3 player.

I have 2 USB mass storage mp3 player: the Creative Muvo 100 and the Samsung YP-S5 with Asiatic v1.50 firmware. Rhythmbox has very simple support for those USB devices: simply add a ".is_audio_player" file in the root of the mp3 player (see: http://live.gnome.org/Rhythmbox/FAQ). The mp3 player is now automatically detected by Rhythmbox, and filling the player with songs from the FireFly server is as simple as drag'n'drop. The transfer is terribly slow, but that's probably because I'm connecting through wifi.

For both the Muvo 100 and the YP-S5 I put the following file in the root: .is_audio_player

audio_folders=Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg

As the FAQ above mentions, this overrides the HAL. I didn't check (yet) if the default HAL settings are OK for the 2 devices. Anyway, this works fine for me.

Tip: with ctrl+H you can display the hidden files (=files that start with a dot '.') in Nautilus.