Banhee Transcoding
Mar 4 2008
So after finally getting the FLAC version of Ghost, I wondered if Banshee’s transparent transcoding would keep all the metadata intact and I could enjoy the album on my ipod too.
Sadly the codec situation did have to ruin my out-of-the-box euphoria. So to be of some aid to my fellow opensuseists, here’s how.
opensuse 10.3 doesn’t include the LAME mp3 encoder plugin in gstreamer010-plugins-ugly like other distros seem to. You need to grab the package from Packman. If you want to cover all your codec bases, you can actually do the install with one click (Pure marketing speak, it does sound better than 9 clicks + 72 popups; KDE folks get served here).
You can bring up the device properties from the sidebar context menu to access transcoding properties.
If you’re like the cool kids and use the lightning fast red carpet, however, you can –
rug sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.3/ packman && \
rug in packman:gstreamer010-plugins-ugly
It will actually pull its own gstreamer and replace the default one, but it did not seem to break anything for me.
After this, you can check out for presence of the magical LAME encoder with gst-inspect | grep mp3. If all went fine, you can simply drag and drop the flac files onto your ipod and Banshee will do the transcoding. And yes, the metadata is all fine.