Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich: Uploading Music

UPDATE: Using Rhythmbox (which uses libmtp) to sync a playlist of music to my phone incidentally wiped /sdcard/, including photos and videos, etc.  I think it was probably an issue with libmtp messing up, actually, though.  Be forewarned.

So, with my Nexus One and Gingerbread, I could mount my phone's SD card as a USB mass storage device by just plugging it in to my computer.  That was great, just like a USB key, I get a new device and I copy files over.  With the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich, you can't do that any more.  As always, trying to send files via Bluetooth is failure prone, and using PTP (for photos) doesn't work reliably with other files.  (PTP: That's when you plug your phone in and it treats it like a camera.)

The way recommended by Google and the world is using MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) which is simple in Windows, relatively simple in Mac OS X, but not supported by default by Linux distros yet.  Until recently, nothing really significant that people would run with Linux would use it.

So, to copy files to and from my phone, I'm now using mtpfs, which lets me mount my phone like any other file system when I plug in (just like when it worked as a USB mass storage device!).  This required some steps in Fedora 16.

• download and compile mtpfs
• this required me to install some development file packages:
• yum install libmad-devel libid3tag-devel fuse-devel libmtp-devel
• then I went to http://www.adebenham.com/mtpfs/ and downloaded the source code
• I unpacked it, and did a standard (./configure && make && make install)
• (Thanks to PabloTwo at this thread)
• and then I followed the instructions here:
• http://www.androidcentral.com/ics-feature-mtp-what-it-why-use-it-and-how-set-it
• Except I had manually installed mtpfs
• http://blog.offenders.org/?p=101
• These are specific to Fedora, and tell you a udev rule to automatically mount the phone when you plug it in :D
  

Right now, I managed to mount my phone, but transferring music is going very slowly.   Earlier, I had to upload the "Ta Da" notification noise I loved so much on my Nexus One to my own web space, just so I could download it via the Android browser to get it on my phone.  Yeesh!