Rhythmbox "Scan Removable Media" does nothing

This does not need to be fixed before ship, but should be fixed post ship.

When you insert the USB drive, does the 'eject' icon show up on the launcher next to its name? The reason I am asking is that the drive may not have been mounted. Can you try clicking on it after inserting it (so nautilus launches), and then starting ryhtmbox and scanning removable media.

The drive is mounting, a Nautilus window pops up showing the contents of the drive, and there is an eject arrow to the right of the name. Afaict the system sees the drive. After the nautilus window popped up I went to Rhythmbox and tried Scan Removable Media again. Same result.

Do you know if this works in Hardy?

It doesn't work for me on my desktop either, so I'm guessing it's a Rhythmbox bug. Maybe something to do with gnome-vfs?

This seems to be intentional, although a badly named menu item.

If you run rhythmbox with debugging output ("rhythmbox -d"), you can see it detect the device, and then decide that it's not an audio player.

The feature seems explicitly for portable audio players like an ipod or whatnot. Why they chose "Removable Media" for that is questionable.

Do we want to do anything about it?

You are right it is extremely poorly named. How, then, does one import music from a USB key or external hard drive? We need some way to get music into the library. I do agree that some will use an iPod or similar player, but we should allow one to use just a plane old usb key.

Please let me know the level of effort to have it properly accept the usb key. Alternatively, I guess we re-name the menu item? If either of these will be a significant delay, we will have to make a decision on whether this really needs to be fixed for 1.0.

From my brief understanding of the rhythmbox codebase, it would be considerable work to have it treat USB keys as sources.

We could rename the menu item, but that would add a translation burden. That would be the only delay. Renaming itself, obviously, is easy.

For usb keys/drives your expected to select "import folder" and highlight the drive on the "Places" sidebar, from what I understand.

Thanks for the additional information, and good point about the translations burden. Sounds like an FAQ to me.

Moving to Ubuntu distribution

could somebody having the issue open a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org?

Removed ubuntu-unr tag as this does not seem specific to UNR.

Opened a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=609144
I still see the same thing in lucid.

comment from upstream : "It does exactly what it's supposed to: checks for any removable devices that
should be shown as sources in rhythmbox but currently aren't. It is not how
you are supposed to import music from portable devices." Upstream bug was marked as not a bug.

Closing the bug due to the last upstream comment and because there was no further feedback.