DeaDBeeF One-Way Sync

One-way Sync Plugin for the DeaDBeeF Audio Player

For e.g. managing portable music players like FiiO, Zune, Walkman.

Essentially treats DeaDBeeF playlists as an authoritative source for the contents of the destination. The contents of one or more playlists are copied to the destination, renaming files according to a configurable format. For performance only files newer than existing destination files are copied. Optionally, destination files that no longer have a source file can be purged from the destination. This can be useful e.g. if you want the destination directory structure to reflect playlist structure, have replaced mp3 files with FLAC, or just don't want the files on the destination anymore.

Inspired by foo_ows

Building

Requirements

• ddb_ows requires DeaDBeeF headers >= 788d277 to build as-is. It can be built with older headers by cloning the DeaDBeeF repository to your CPATH and modifying the relevant includes to read from there.
• gtk headers
• meson
• clang
• fmt

export DDB_OWS_LOGLEVEL=n
meson setup build && cd build
meson install

Set n = 0, 1, 2, 3 for increasingly verbose console logging on stderr; the default is 3. To install for the current user only, pass --libir ~/.local/lib to meson setup.

ddb_ows is Linux only with no plans to support other operating systems.

Handling unallowed characters

File systems generally do not allow file names to contain all bytes; e.g. ext[2-4] reserve / and exFAT does not allow the characters /\:*?"<>|. As id3 tags may contain these characters, the following escaping scheme is implemented

1. id3 tags undergo the replacement / -> - before they are seen by title formatting
2. After title formatting unallowed characters other than / are replaced with -.

Thus, for example, the formatting string %artist/%album%/%title% outputs, for the fields

artist: Ulver
album: Perdition City
title: Nowhere/Catastrophe

the string. Ulver/Perdition City/Nowhere-Catastrophe. With the fields

artist: The Ocean
album: Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic
title: Cambrian II: Eternal Recurrence

the output is The Ocean/Phanerozoic I- Palaeozoic/Cambrian II- Eternal Recurrence.

As a consequence, if your title formatting string contains functions whose outputs include / (e.g., $replace(%title%, -, /), $if(..., /) these will be interpretated literally; that is, so as to sub-path.

This behaviour replicates foo_fileops as far as I can tell without source access.

Case-sensitivity

If your metadata is inconsistent in capitalisation, on a case-sensitive file system the output directory structure may be similarly inconsistent. That is, if you have files tagged both Simon and Garfunkel and Simon And Garfunkel and the destination format is something like %artist%/%title%.%filename_ext%, ddb_ows will (attempt to) create two directories. This is not an issue on case-insensitive file systems such as vfat. On, e.g., ext3, though, this may not be what you want. You can mogrify your format with string replacing functions, but the best solution is probably to retag your files using consistent capitalisation.

Sorting

Many portable music players do not sort filesystem entries in any way, going entirely by directory entry order in the filesystem. As you add tracks or move them between playlists, or even just as a result of multithreading, this may increasingly diverge from what you want. If your target filesystem is FAT the fatsort tool addresses precisely this problem. Run fatsort on the target filesystem after each sync.

License

GPL 3