Re: Common music database?

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> 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?

All of this is already supported in Tracker provided the supplied URI is 
unique with respect to the file.

The "factual" metadata (I call it "embedded") as well as all other 
metadata is fully settable in the interface so you can set all the 
Audio.* (like Audio.Artist) and File.* (like File.Size) and other 
attributes that way.

Once I have made the last few changes to the next version of Tracker, I 
will be happy to do a rhythmbox plug-in to demostrate its capabilities 
in all the discussed areas.


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/