[linux-minidisc] First patch for write support on HiMD available

[Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Hello,

after several months of hacking and frustrations, Mårten has finally published his
first patch to libhimd to provide write support for MP3s onto HiMDs. For those of
you who don't know what I am talking about: it means that we're finally able to
write our own tracks onto HiMD media with free software and without the help
of SonicStage, meaning we've made a huge steps towards our aim of completely
obsoleting SonicStage and being able to use MiniDisc hardware with completely free
software.

The patch itself is quite long (33k) and has not yet been pushed to the main
repository as it certainly requires some testing and clean-up, it can therefore
be found on my web space among other pending patches [1].

You can download and apply the patch to the current git master repository
to test the code yourself. We highly appreciate any feedback, suggestions
and bug reports.

The easiest way to test the patch is to apply against a fresh checkout from the git
master, to do so, please follow these steps (instructions for Ubuntu Linux):

- open a terminal or logon through a text console
- make sure you have all build dependencies installed, add "libid3tag0-dev"
  to that list (see [2] or [3] for MacOS X), thus "sudo apt-get install libid3tag0-dev"
- git clone git://minidisc.dyndns.org/linux-minidisc
- wget http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaubitz/linux-minidisc/pending-patches/0001-Enable-transferring-MP3-files-to-HiMD-himddump.patch
- cd linux-minidisc
- patch -p1 < ../0001-Enable-transferring-MP3-files-to-HiMD-himddump.patch
- qmake-qt4 -r && make
- cd himddump
- connect and mount your HiMD Walkman
- ./himddump /path/to/your/himdwalkman/ writemp3 /path/to/an/mp3/file.mp3

This will checkout the main repository, download the patch, apply it, configure
and build the code and run himddump to write the mp3 file "file.mp3".

In order to see what got written to the disk, use:

- ./himddump /path/to/your/himdwalkman/ tracks verbose

This should output something like:

   1: 4:47 MPEG The Chemical Brothers:Asleep From Day (Surrender 7) [uploadable]
       423 Blocks per 16 KB
       0@00000 ..  26@00422 (0000000000000000)
     Contend ID: 02030000915170fcc35f46c9e707066ea9e983ed
     Key: 0000000000000000 (EKB 00000000); MAC: 0000000000000000
     Recorded: 11/27/2008 12:16:30 AM, start: ?, end: ?
   2: 3:02 MPEG F-Zero:Title Screen (Naoto Ishida 1) [uploadable]
       268 Blocks per 16 KB
       0@00423 ..  77@00690 (19fc347a00000000)
     Contend ID: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
     Key: 19fc347a00000000 (EKB 00010012); MAC: 0000000000000000
     Recorded: 01/00/2028 12:00:00 AM, start: 01/00/2028:12:00:00 AM, end: 01/00/2028:12:00:00 AM

where the track you just wrote to the HiMD should appear as the last one, in this case
it's a track from the F-Zero SNES game original soundtrack =).

Please test this code as much as you can, especially on real hardware and
make suggestions and bug reports. We count on you!

All the credits for this patch go to Mårten, thank you. And, of course, to Michael
who helped him with all the pitfalls and difficulties in libhimd!

We hope to be able to push that into git master soon and make it available
in qhimdtransfer. Therefore we need your feedback!

Have a lot of fun,

Adrian

[1] http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~glaubitz/linux-minidisc/pending-patches/
[2] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php?id=compilingonlinux
[3] https://wiki.physik.fu-berlin.de/linux-minidisc/doku.php?id=compilingonmac