just seeing what others think, part 2 :)

[Robert Ford <odinboy71 yahoo com>]

the purpose of my idea is to archive complete music
albums. you can think of it like as a playable
compressed audio cd image with some bonuses. 

first) is the ripper, it begins by ripping the wavs
from the cd and generates a play-list like file. then
downloads the cd covers, song lyrics, band info, or
anything that is deemed useful. lastly it compresses
the wavs, images, info, play-list, and whatever else
into one single archive. this could be done with
either standard compressors like gz:bz2:rar or
something new. the standard compressors dont stack up
that well against something like ogg or mp3, but they
are standard compressors and rhythmbox will already
play music in a rar (maybe others too). the new
compressor could be designed new or is modified from
an already existing one to compress wav files as best
as possible, hopefully with in the ogg/mp3 rang. it is
also possible to archive vinyl too. have the ripper
save the recorded file as one long wav. then have the
play-list be set by song length. when wanting to play
a song, the player skips ahead to the time in the file
when that song starts. 

second) is either a stand alone player or a plugin for
existing ones (like rhythmbox). this player (or
plugin) will load the play-list and display the cd
cover directly from the archive. it also will give the
option to see the song lyrics, and what ever else. and
of course, plays the music. ;)

third) is what can be done with nautilus, the first
idea is to have it burn an audio cd like how cd images
(.iso) are burned now. second is to have nautilus
display the cd cover stored in the archive as it's
file icon.

there have been a few questions about this already 

1) whats the difference between a directory and an
archive?

the player would have to scan each file in every
directory when building a song database. this can be
time consuming, rhythmbox can take a good long while
to build a database which has a lot of songs (multi
1,000's) from scratch. lets say each album has an
average of 10 songs, lets say you have a cd collection
of 100 to 1,000 albums. converting this to mp3/ogg
will produce 1,000 to 10,000 files. the media player
will have to scan each and every file when building
the song database. for my idea, only the archive
play-list would be scanned, which being only 100 to
1,000 file scans to build the database. thats a 9/10
savings of time.    

2) what if the archive is corrupted, then you lose all
the songs.

we don't rip/encode DVD's in chapters, its all kept in
one big file too. same thing here.    

3) there are play-list for directories already, so
whats the difference here? 

well yes there are, but they to my knowledge are not
portable, such as a m3u. if you change the name of the
directory or move it, the play-list file becomes
broken. the play-list file in the archive is just a
list of its contents, where the archive is located
does not really matter to it.

4) why include the extra data in the archive, why not
just have the player download them?

if you share the archives between different user, each
user would need to download the extra data themselves.
having multiple copies of the same files is not a very
efficient use of storage space or bandwidth. if you
want to take the music to somewhere else, the extra
data would be left behind. including the extra data in
the archive just makes sense to me i guess.

5) its to big to share online. not every one wants to
download the whole album.

thats not the indented purpose, its to backup and
archive music collections. where everything is kept in
a nice and neat package.    

p.s. 
now thinking about it more, it is possible to do
everything as gstreamer plugins. make the compressor,
then do everything else as gst-plugins  

just sharing an idea :)

Robert

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