Last week I purchased a Samsung Galaxy S3. It’s a beautiful phone, and I’ve been happy with it so far. Getting it to work with Ubuntu, so I can transfer or sync my music files with it, has been a huge headache, however.
The short of it is this: version 1.1.0 of libmtp, which is what’s packaged with Ubuntu 11.10, doesn’t seem to work with the Galaxy S3. (MTP is the protocol the phone uses to transfer files to and from a PC. Unlike the previous Galaxy devices, the S3 doesn’t mount as a normal USB drive.) The phone just doesn’t get recognized. After reading this bug report, I downloaded the source for the latest version, 1.1.5, and compiled it by hand. (Note: you’ll need to install a -dev package for libusb via apt-get.) That was partially successful: the gmtp program could connect to the phone and show files and directories, but Banshee (2.2.1) now crashed on startup. I was hoping to use Banshee, since it’s a nice iTunes-like music management application that I’d already been using regularly. I could try the latest Banshee (2.6) by compiling that by hand too, but that feels like a bigger ordeal than I’d like to deal with right now.
The easiest solution, of course, is to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu with newer versions of all the above software. But 12.04 ships with libmtp 1.1.3, and 12.10 ships with 1.1.4, and I have no idea whether these are recent enough to work.
I’ve been putting off an upgrade because I’m not even sure I want to stick with Ubuntu at all, given the recent issues with data privacy in 12.10.
So it looks like I’m out of luck, in terms of using Banshee to sync music on my current OS installation. I’ve resorted to installing an FTP server on the S3, and copying music that way. It’s awkward and annoying, but it will have to do for now. Perhaps I will write a quick script to do better facilitate music sync’ing over FTP…
(NOTE: This blog post was reconstructed after my super-light traffic WordPress database got mysteriously corrupted this afternoon. Thank you, MySQL. This has not been the greatest of technology days.)