Re: Common music database?

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 14:24 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> I believe the best way to deal with this in Tracker is to treat those 
> files as virtual (VFS style). SO maybe you could define a URI for it 
> that includes the HAL device, volume UDI and relative path of the media 
> file (HAL://UDI/media.ogg) and then attach metadata against that uri.
   8<---snip--->8
> As I said before, Tracker treats virtual files as simply a string ID 
> with which you can attach metadata to but it will not automatically 
> extract metadata from it so you will need to manually populate Tracker 
> with any metadata you need (including File.* stuff like mime type as 
> well as any Audio.* stuff) and this goes for both Gnome-VFS, KIO-slaves 
> as well as any arbitrary uris like HAL.

Recently I had an idea related to extra URI schemes, and I thought I'd
get people opinion on whether it was interesting and/or complete crack.


If we wanted to use things in extra URI schemes, we would want to
standardise them, and one good candidate would be audio cds. If we
decided on a scheme, for example audiocd://unique_id/track_number, we
could store user metadata for audio cds. This would means that audio
players using it could keep track of things like play counts and rating
for audio cds - something players don't do currently.

An extension to this would be associating the "factual" metadata
(artist, title et al) with those URIs. I'm not sure whether this is
currently possible in Tracker, but could indexers register themselves
for a URI scheme rather than a file type? That way, there could be a
MusicBrainz indexer that handles audiocd:// URIs by automatically
fetching the info from MB (potentially caching it or whatever).


Does that sound like it would be a useful kind of thing?


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
-- 
"Don't these people watch Jackie Chan movies? *Everything*'s a weapon!
Next thing, they'll ban ballpoint pens, 'coz you can stab somebody with
them. Or laptops, because you could force someone to install Windows
3.1. With a ballpoint pen, presumably." - Eric The Red, in the SDM