No application to launch when plugging in ipod

Question

I am running Banshee 1.8.0 on a more-or-less vanilla Meerkat installation. I was most pleased when I plugged in an old iPod Nano and it Just Worked.

However, when plugging in the iPod, Nautilus/Gnome asks for an application to handle the newly inserted iPod. The dialog presents no applications that can handle the device and allows no manual choice.

I have reinstalled banshee with apt-get purge and also install --reinstall but neither added an association. As before, when manually opened, banshee happily talks to the iPod, it just won't launch on plug.

I suspect there is a missing association in gconf or something similar but I'm not sure where this information lives.

Answer 1

First try to set your preferred application for the media player in System->Preferences->Preferred applications:

If you don't have banshee in your list, select custom and add command /usr/bin/banshee. And if that doesn't work you can try also with File manager preferences:

Where I have set "Ask what to do", try to set as banshee

old: THIS might help as this happend before.

Answer 2

It sounds like the MIME type database may be incomplete. Normally, the following should list about a dozen lines corresponding to types of media that can be assigned auto-run preferences:

grep x-content /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

If they don't show up, first verify that the following returns a line containing audio-player:

grep x-content /usr/share/applications/banshee*.desktop

Then try regenerating the database by running:

sudo update-desktop-database --verbose

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If that doesn't help, setting the following in ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list should function as a lazy workaround:

[Added Associations]
x-content/audio-player=banshee-1-media-player.desktop;

Answer 3

This may be a stab in the dark, but:

1. Create a file ~/.local/share/mime/x-content/audio-player.xml (creating folders along the way if necessary)

2. Put the following in it:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <mime-type xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info" type="x-content/audio-player">
     <!--Created automatically by update-mime-database. DO NOT EDIT!-->
     <comment>portable audio player</comment>
   </mime-type>
   

3. Now try to set the default audio player for inserting an audio device.

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Also, you could try:

update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

but I've never tried that... I have no idea if it will do what you want. From the man page:

update-mime-database is an program which is responsible for updating the shared mime-info cache according to the system described in the Shared MIME-Info Database specification from the X Desktop Group.