Re: Common music database?

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 22:38 -0700, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> So I have a question.  Let's say that I have my hard drive all index'd;
> added a bunch of tags and so forth.  Now, I got myself one of those
> pocket drives, and I want to copy my music from my hard drive to my pen
> drive or whatever, and listen to it at work.  How would my metadata,
> including my tags move with me?

This is a large reason why I advocate using extended attributes:
metadata moves with the files, rather than requiring a special program
to copy it or doing it out-of-band with a database merge or sidecar
file.

Of course, your pocket drive is probably formatted vfat, which doesn't
do xattrs, hrm.

For music, though, all the important formats allow metadata to be set
inside the file.  This, obviously, is the ideal situation.
Unfortunately it is often limiting (like id3 tags), but it's better than
nothing at all.

Joe