[Rhythmbox-devel] rb feature idea - library file normalization

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

... no, not the normalization of the sound in files :)

My situation is I have a large library, mostly high quality mp3s, lots
of ogg rips, and lots of flac rips.  All the music is properly tagged
via musicbrainz.

What happens is I point RB at my music directory and I get lots of
duplicates.  Also, I'll get some of them lossless and some mp3, and
while I want the mp3s to move over to my mp3 player, I'd like the flac
in preference to mp3 while listening at my desktop.

So my idea is basically have a plugin or system that will hide music
that it finds dupes of and will automatically choose the highest quality 
where available.  Dupes would be defined by I suppose either exact same
id3 tags for track, artist, album and track number or filename without
extension.  

"Highest quality" would be defined by a set precidence (flac > ogg > mp3
 > wmv > mp2 or something like that) and if it found multiple copies of
the same filename, chose the highest bitrate (where of course vbr >
cbr).  I vaugly recall a 'find dupes' plugin around, but I'm not sure if
it was for RB or banshee, and if it did something like this where users
would still be able to control their entire library, just be selective
in what is shown in the library window in RB.

Also, with this sort of ability you could reverse the filter so when I 
load up songs for my aging little 256mb mp3 player, I can choose the 
lowest / smallest filesize.  I'm not sure if this'd be interesting to
anyone but me though, as I am apparently the last person in the world
not to have an iPod :(

Anyway, does this sound useful at all to anyone?  Thoughts, ideas?

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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