Re: [Banshee-List] Auto-updating music library

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

2009/3/30 Andrew Conkling <andrew andrewski net>

2009/3/30 David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>

I never quite understood the obsession with this specific feature. Personally I would consider the right solution to have an indexer like Beagle and then using Xesam to populate the library. This application specific file monitoring sounds like power waster to me, especially if more applications start doing it for their own purpose.

Could someone enlighten me as to why this is so popular?

I think your over-technicalifying it. The popular feature request is "Update my Library automatically". No one cares how it's done, they just want it done. Your implementation sounds great, assuming Beagle (or Tracker, I suppose) could do all of that, and certainly it would save a lot of redundant functionality built in to Banshee.

I've actually had several people specifically say they did not like Tracker or Beagle. Considering them a CPU hog and a battery drain, much preferring the "rhythmbox" approach. It might be some what reasoned in the fact that for a while a lot of distros shipped indexers by default and they didn't really do anything with them giving the appearance that they were useless, especially since both Tracker and Beagle have had issues in the past causing this uselessness to be directly harmful to the computing experience. Whereas the approach of selectively monitoring directories historically worked very well for the specific job being targeted.
 

Almost all database-driven file-system-abstracting applications encounter this disparity between what's on the disk and what's in the app. Updating brings parity, automatic updating brings convenience. I think that's really all that lies behind it. (For me anyway.)

I would hope so, I to, would love a way to keep my library constantly updated. Actually I would like to take it several steps further but that is another debate all together.