Great news to see M3U support added in firmware 2.31b. Naturally I upgraded having requested this feature when I bought the wonderful S9.

The problem is that the S9 doesn't seem to be able to read the M3U files. They are shown under Playlists in the browser but when I select one, it just says "No File".

They are extended M3U as the firmware information says they ought to be and they look correct to me.

I'm attaching an M3U taken from the S9.

Hope this helps.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:224,Mario Vazquez - 4 The 1
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\4 The 1 - Mario Vazquez.mp3
#EXTINF:232,Kylie Minogue ft. Mims - All I See
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\All I See - Kylie Minogue Ft. Mims.mp3
#EXTINF:184,Kylie Minogue - All I See
F:\Music\RnB\2000s\All I See - Kylie Minogue.mp3

Are you saying any of the following (based on the differences between what you pasted in and what I have):

1) The S9 will only support M3U files for MP3 tracks, not Ogg?
2) The S9 requires the paths referenced in the M3U to include a dummy Windows drive letter at the front?
3) The S9 requires the paths to be \ delimited (Windows style) and that / (Linux) won't work?

I'm pretty sure it's not 3 as I replaced all instances of / with \ in an M3U and the S9 still behaved the same way.

Any of these would represent major breakage really - surely the S9 can understand paths that are relative to itself and there ought to be no problem with either using / or using Ogg files.

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:294,Motherless Children
E:\Music\01-Motherless Children.Flac
#EXTINF:247,Better Make It Through Today
E:\Music\02-Better Make It Through Today.Flac

As you see above. The music files are located in the music folder of COWON S9. If the path is correct then it will work.

2) But surely the software just skips over it as it could be different on any occasion.

Windows has its main HDD as C: and lets say a DVD drive at D:. Attaching the S9 will mount it as E:. But the next time you attach it, if there's already a USB drive attached, the S9 will mount as F:.

So, surely it would be trivial to be able to be able to cope with paths that don't begin with a drive letter - adding support for the two major OSs (Linux/MacOS) that you support that don't use that style of drive nomenclature.

3) A similar point to 2) really here. Allowing the lines to be parsed by / as well as \ would open up support for non-Windows OSs.

When reading the line in, all that would be needed would be something like (in pseudo perl code:)

if ($line =~ m/^\//) {  # Check if the line begins with just a /
                        # indicating a UNIX OS being used (escaping of course)
  $line =~ s/\//\\/g;   # Replace / with \ with appropriate escaping of characters
}

This avoids - of course - a situation where a Windows user has a file with '/' in the filename that gets renamed incorrectly.

These trivial changes would mean that the M3U support would mean that the only functionality not available to Linux/MacOS users through mass storage would be album art (not a huge loss) and I could get the S9 supported in HAL for Linux (not sure how it works with MacOS I'm afraid) so that music players would be able to automatically sync with it - and write playlists.

It would also mean that those of us with a voice in the Open Source community could trumpet the S9 as the music player of choice - its quality already invites that and these relatively trivial fixes would seal it.

Please understand too that I'm genuinely trying to help - not just to be awkward, I love the S9 and I think more people should use it and those with whom I have influence are generally Open Source users.

So, I'm publishing them. They're in the home:Riggwelter:GNOME_Contrib repository for 11.1 and Factory. Feel free to test them but the usual warnings about non-stable and non-official packages.

While I've been doing that, Cowon have released an updated firmware that adds M3U playlist support. This is a real result for Linux users. The S9 doesn't actually seem to be able to read the M3U files correctly as yet but I've opened this as an issue with Cowon and hopefully they'll fix it in the next release. Remember, this latest firmware is only a beta and may eat your children or your data - install with care although I've had no problems other that then non-reading M3Us.

Just have to get the HAL information integrated upstream so that people don't have to download my .fdi file for it.

Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

PDF of the accompanying presentation.

PDF of the accompanying presentation.

Of late, I have been particularly thinking about what that new form of government might look like and my thoughts (work in progress of course) are below. These are proposals for the national government and begin at the top and work down.

• Abolish the Monarchy
  In the 21st Century, there is no excuse for a head of state who gets the job on the basis of who their father or mother was. The monarch should be replaced with a directly elected President, serving for a maximum of three five-year, fixed-term stints. The President, with the cabinet, would be responsible for proposing legislation for Parliament to vote upon. The President would also carry the duties of state of representing Great Britain and Northern Ireland (see devolution note below) abroad both ceremonially as per the current monarch and at an inter-governmental level as per the Prime Minister.
• Abolish the House of Lords
  If there is no excuse for an hereditary head of state, there is even less for hereditary or appointed legislators. The Lords would be replaced with a small, elected, Senate - around 75 members at most who would serve ten-year, fixed term stints, with half the Senate being elected every five years. Senators would be elected on a regional basis by a system of proportional representation.
• Reduce the size of the House of Commons
  The UK has one of highest densities of parliamentarians in the Western, democratic world. A Professor of Politics from the LSE recently suggested that 400 would be a much more appropriate number for a nation of its size. The name House of Commons would also no longer be approriate as, without a corresponding House of Lords, anyone - commoner or peer - could stand. This house would therefore be called something like the National Assembly and its members would serve five-year, fixed term stints - the same five year rotation as the Senate and, also like the Senate, MPs would be elected on a regional basis by a system of proportional representation.
• A cross-house, cross-party cabinet
  The PR system would ensure that it would be rare for any party to hold a majority in either house and so the President would form a cabinet from across both houses and across all parties. A desire for legislation to pass would prevent presidents from appointing solely from their own party and alienating the majority of elected representatives.
• Take Devolution Seriously
  At the moment, there is the serious anomoly where areas of responsibility that are devolved to the parliaments and assemblies of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland cannot be affected in those nations of English MPs but within England, those issues can still be voted upon by non-English MPs. Senators and MPs under the new system would only be able to vote on bills that actually affected the region for which they were elected. The nations of the UK ought also to be allowed referenda on independence.

A vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for social justice and a mature and sensible approach to Europe.

A vote for the BNP or UKIP is a reactionary, ill-thought-out, racist and dangerous decision.

Vote Liberal Democrat today.

Vincent blogged about the testing day as part of openSUSE Community Week. I've been testing out gnome-shell and it's looking good. Even on the fairly old hardware on which I'm running it - everything is at least five years old - it's only a little sluggish and this is still at an early stage of development.

If you're interested in joining in testing it, get in touch with Vincent.

Today I had a response telling me that I can create playlists using Windows Media Player.

There's something to be said for a complete unwillingness to read an email properly before responding and for that - and nothing else in this instance - Cowon are to be applauded.

I'm going to go back to them and point out the flaw in their reasoning.

Update: Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

The thing is that I want it to work with Banshee too. To do this, I need to persuade HAL that it's an music player, so with a bit of lshal and some XML munging, I've produced a .fdi file for it: 10-cowon-s9.fdi. Save that file, remove the .txt from the end and put it in /etc/hal/fdi/information. Then execute rchal restart (on openSUSE - other distros will likely have a different command to restart HAL) and plug the S9 in.

The only downside I've come across so far is the S9's lack of support for playlists. I've included playlist support in the .fdi as Banshee can play from it and I've emailed Cowon asking them to add this trivial function to the next firmware update. I'm using the latest Beta firmware and it works fine.