Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

["Tshepang Lekhonkhobe" <tshepang gmail com>]

On 2/14/07, John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com> wrote:
> > Mandriva provide default directory layout for Music, image, etc. How do
> > Mac OS X ? I guess we should have something similar to g_get_home_dir
> > (), g_get_config_dir () for media. This should be done in XDG.
>
> This sounds a bit like we are doing the job of the computer here. To a
> large extent I dont care where my photos are, where my music is,
> directories are soooo 1990's. I just want it to show in my media
> center.
>
> A rich desktop wide metadata store will be able to find all my music
> for free, find all my photos. My mum likes to store things in "My
> Pictures" but when she forgets then she is practically lost when it
> comes to tracking down here files....
>
> We can improve the situation by agreeing on sane defaults, XDG wide,
> or we can embrace a system where we are free from remembering where we
> store stuff.
>
> I could explicitly plug tracker here but im sure other wasabi [0]
> compatible systems will get the job done.
>
> In the case of a media center (im thinking of xbox media center
> because thats what I use but the concept is general enough) A
> directory based layout is practically never shown to the user anyway,
> its "Songs by this artist" "Photos from this week" etc. It therefor
> seems unneeded work to create a standard directory layout for Music
> etc when its going to need to be presented to the user in a whole
> bunch of new ways. Let alone the corner cases that are going to be
> hard to cover. I dont think a hard coded approach scales...
>
> So lets embrace a GNOME desktop where the heavy lifting is done for us
> and we use the metadata from the files. Ive said it before but Tracker
> [1] can facilitate these use cases, and more.

I was also surprised why them people on this thread were so concerned
by Music and whatever folders they want to store the media in when you
can just index the whole thing, and thanks for mentioning that
fabulous Tracker of things. I wouldn't have explained better why an
indexer would be so much better than yet-more-standards where to put
media in (and I think that Sound Juicer patch should be thrown far
away).

OT:
I always found the Microsoft way of naming things ridiculous (My
Documents, Program Files), and I surely won't name my music directory
the ugly Music, rather 'music' or 'sounds' or whatever else but Music.