Ubuntu – How to import/export Radio Station list of Rhythmbox

My two cents, applicable to Banshee 2.3.3 / Rhythmbox 2.95:

1. Music library: just specify your Music folder to Rhythmbox and it will be imported
2. Playlists:
   • Dynamic Playlists: as far as I know you will have to re-create them. Not fun, with additional complication due to the different feature sets of each player.
   • Static Playlists: just export them as .m3u in Banshee and re-import them in Rhythmbox
3. Playcounts and ratings
   • Playcounts: I don't know
   • Ratings: create a dynamic playlist for each of the stars (i.e. create "rating1,rating2,rating3,rating4,rating5" dynamic playlists, then export them as .m3u, then import them in Rhythmbox. I just tested it, both players use filenames relative to ~ , so you will be fine.
   • One solution to both would be to implement #538549 - Use of ID3v2 Popularimeter for Rating (maybe Play Count)
4. Radio stations: I don't know
5. Cover pictures: while not a "migration" option, Rhythmbox 2.9x/3 does a better job at handling cover art. Try it by enabling the Cover Art and Cover Art Search plugins in Edit / Plugins. In my case (cover art stored as .jpg in the folder, or as ID3), they are recognized just fine

Hope that helps! Good luck :)

The image shows the default RadioTray radio stations imported into Rhythmbox

How did I do that?

RadioTray holds its radio-stations in an XML file located in:

~/.local/share/radiotray/bookmarks.xml

Rhythmbox holds all of its data similarly in an XML file located in:

~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml

If you examine both files its pretty obvious that the XML format (its defined structure) is very different.

One solution is to transform the Radiotray XML format to something that Rhythmbox can understand.

XSLT

You can use the structured XML translation language XSLT to perform this conversion.

To install:

sudo apt-get install python-4suite-xml

Next copy the contents below into a new gedit file

Save in a file (create the folder xml if necessary) called ~/xml/style

Next, copy the RadioTray XML file to the same folder ~/xml

Finally, copy the Rhythmbox XML file to the same folder ~/xml

Drop to a terminal:

cd ~/xml
4xslt bookmarks.xml style > test.xml

This will reformat the RadioTray into the XML that can be read by RhythmBox

Next we need to add this new data to Rhythmbox.

Now open both test.xml and rhythmdb.xml

Copy the contents of test.xml EXCEPT for the first line into the rhythmdb.xml file. Note - you paste the contents at the end of the file i.e.

</entry>

*****paste test.xml here*****

</rhythmdb>

Save.

Backup the old rhythmdb.xml file and then copy over the new rhythmdb.xml file.

Fire up Rhythmbox

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">

      <xsl:for-each select="bookmarks/group/group/bookmark">
      <entry type="iradio">
        <title><xsl:value-of select="@name"/></title>
        <genre><xsl:value-of select="translate(../@name,'','')"/></genre>
        <artist></artist>
        <album></album>
    <location><xsl:value-of select="@url"/></location>
        <date>0</date>
        <media-type>application/octet-stream</media-type>
      </entry>
      </xsl:for-each>

</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>