[Muine] My own little rant

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

I have no time but for my own quick rant:

- Stop whining about the Mono dependency. Don't tell me you really care
about a 23 MB dependency (gosh! how awful! it takes 0.00001% of my
zillion gb hard drive! as much as 5 mp3s! ugh!). If you don't like it,
don't use it- but don't waste our time with such utterly pointless
whining. I'm not gonna waste my time rewriting the app in C because of
some silly anti-mono zealots. If you don't like it, don't use it - thank
you very much.

- The album key is "dirname:album name" because of the following
reasons: (I should add a comment in the code ..)
We cannot do artist/performer matching, because it is very common for
albums to be made by different artists. Random example, the Sigur
R�adiohead split. Using "Various Artists" as artist tag is whacky.
But, we cannot match only by album name either: a user may very well
have multiple albums with the title "Greatest Hits". We don't want to
incorrectly group all these together.
So, the best thing we've managed to come up with so far is using
dirname:albumname. This because most people who even have whole albums
have those organised in folders, or at the very least all music files in
the same folder. So for those it should more or less work. And for those
who have a decently organised music collection, the original target user
base, it should work flawlessly. And for those who have a REALLY poorly
organised collection, well, bummer. Moving all files to the same dir
will help a bit.

- The fuzzy album grouping: I'm no big fan. There are a few issues
coming up with it: What is the right album title we use for display?
etc. But those are relatively minor. ToLowering the string we can do,
but stripping non-alphanumeric chars is not right I think. Again, first
example that comes to my head: Sigur R�"()" album.

- I really think the real solution to these kind of problems lies with
correctly tagged files, however not as Viet Yen suggests spending days
in easytag as installed by the sysadmin ;) What I'd like to see at some
point is a decent tagger with musicbrainz and amazon integration, which
should allow it to automatically and correctly tag most mp3s flawlessly.
It surely won't be able to fix all, but the few remaining should be
doable by hand- or just ignored.


I'll be back.

Jorn