Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Proposal for first-generation Musicbrainzintegration

[Joshua Haberman <joshua haberman com>]

On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 10:08, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 11:49, Joshua Haberman wrote:
> 
> > - having one button to query the musicbrainz server in the song
> > properties dialog
> > - filling in the values automatically if one result is found
> > - popping up a dialog asking the user to choose the correct result if
> > more than one result is returned
> > - closing the properties would save the tags.
> 
> I think one important thing to realize is that tag editing is quite a
> separate activity from music playback, in general.  I think you should
> be able to change the fields in the rb property boxes.  But when you
> start talking about wanting to change a bunch of songs at once, pop up
> dialogs, display various Musicbrainz matches...that's where you want a
> separate application.

I agree that extensive tag-editing facilities don't belong in Rhythmbox;
however in my vision heavy Musicbrainz integration doesn't imply tag
editing at all.

Musicbrainz serves two roles:

1. giving a song an identity.  That identity is manifested as
artist/album/track ids that reference the Musicbrainz database. 
Musicbrainz audio fingerprinting can give a song this identity based on
the the sound data, so we want to support an operation that looks a song
up based on an audio fingerprint and gives the song the correct
identity.

2. using a song's identity to look up useful data about that song.  That
information could then be stored in tags or just displayed.

I think Musicbrainz has the potential to make these tagger applications
obsolete.  I realize this is a strange view since Musicbrainz most
visible products at this point are tagger applications.  The only
unresolved question in my vision is how people will add new songs to the
database (once they exist in the database, the data can be modified
through the web).

Josh