[Rhythmbox-devel] duplicate-format songs in library; speed of import

[shivers ccs neu edu]

I have two questions/issues with respect to Rhythmbox.

1. I keep songs redundantly formatted in my music repository: every
   song is stored full-resolution in flac and lossily compressed in
   mp3. This means that when I import my repository into Rhythmbox,
   I see every song twice. This completely hoses my ability to play albums
   with any ease at all.

   I've pored through the minimal documentation that comes with Rhythmbox,
   done some simple google searches and grepped the devel mailing list
   for the keyword "duplicate". (The latter came up dry with a message that
   made me believe something is wrong with search in the mail archives.) I
   found nothing on this topic.

   Is there some way to handle this issue? What I'd like is some way to
   say: if two tracks with different formats match on some specified set
   of metadata (e.g., title/artist/album/year), then just show me the track
   with the preferred format. Or something along those lines.

2. I was really astounded by the slowness with which Rhythmbox imports
   from my media repository. My repository has about 7500 tracks from 641
   albums. Each album is a distinct unix directory, containing its tracks
   in both flac & mp3 format; these files all have .flac and .mp3 extensions.
   The directories also contain a bunch of small metadata text files, with
   extensions like .db, .inf, and one or two with no extension at all, like
   "md5sums". It took about 12 hours to load the songs into Rhythmbox's
   library -- wow! It seems like reading about 100 bytes of information
   from 15,000 files ought to take a few minutes, tops. I have no idea what
   the problem is; I just report it.

   I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 & a 2.6.20 kernel on a fast cpu (an Athlon FX-60)
   that wasn't loaded at all when I did this import, so the system isn't
   underpowered.

Thanks.
    -Olin