The next hurdle to take was the placement of the files when you drag them onto the removable device shown in Rhythmbox. By default, the files would be placed in the root of the device. As the folder for mp3s is actually “mp3″ on the Memory Stick, we have to open the prevoiously created “.is_audio_player” file and place the following content into it:

audio_folders=mp3/
folder_depth=1

This tells Rhythmbox to place any files into the “mp3″ folder of the Memory Stick and create a “<Artist>-<Album>” directory where the songs are stored. Specifying “folder_depth=2″ would actually create a folder for the artist and below that one a folder for the album. But that’s not my preference.

So, all in all I am quite confident with this now. But the question remains why one has to search the net for such information, hand craft a file and put obviously undocumented – or at least not easily findable – configurations in there? Rhythmbox has support for the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) which could make live easier, but this doesn’t account for pure USB mass storage devices. So at least that part should be configurable within the music management application itself. Room for improvement.