Rhythmbox, MTP, and MSC on ubuntu 12.04LTS 64bit

Hello,

my android stock rom was version 4.2.2. To make Rhythmbox (2.96 version in 12.04 LTS) recognize the device as music player, I had MSC (mass storage) activated, put a .is_audio_player in root directory and synched my music on my android's external sd card. It was pretty straightforward, i.e. drag and drop from Rhythmbox to the music player device icon.

I had to upgrade my android with Cyanogenmod 11, which gave me android version 4.4.4. MSC is gone and I'm left with MTP. Despite using the portable player MTP plugin, no music device is recognized within Rhythmbox. When I plug the device, nautilus opens, I see "internal storage" and "sd card" and I can copy the files with nautilus, but it's not exactly the same (I have to reconstruct folder hierarchy on sd card, something that Rhythmbox did automatically). I tried banshee and Clementine - both show me the player, but synching is not very successful at all (takes too long, returns timeout, or apps crash).

If I could at least use gnome-commander here, but I can't find where the sdcard is mounted to.

I also tried airdroid, but apart from feeing a little overkill, it still doesn't sync my music's folder structure, i.e. I must manually create them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

You probably should have posted this in the Linux-Mobile forum to get more responses. I assume your device is rooted and you've made the appropriate changes to android KitKat to give you proper write access to your external SD card. Kitkat made a lot of changes which have made a lot of people unhappy. In particular, KitKat out of the box restricts write access to an external SD card and obfuscates the filesystem hierarchy. I had to root my Samsung tablet which runs KitKat to overcome some of these limitations.

On my rooted Samsung tablet, I use an excellent free application called "Terminal IDE":

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...x.spartacuside

This application includes an implementation of rsync which I use along with ssh to sync data on certain directories on my external SD card with my desktop. I don't know if your filesystem layout is the same, but on my tablet the external SD card is mounted on /storage/extSdCard/. Like you, I found MTP to be dog slow and error prone when used on any directory that contains a lot of files. Also, you cannot get rsnyc or file managers that use rsync under the hood to synchronize with anything mounted via MTP. That protocol just doesn't support those type of standard linux tools. I found rsync over ssh to be the best method for file syncing between my desktop and my tablet.