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

[shivers ccs neu edu]

   From: "Christophe Dehais" <christophe dehais gmail com>
   Did yo tried to build 2 smart playlists using the bitrate criterion ?
   (assuming that your flac files are hifi and of higher bitrate than
   your mp3).

Nice idea! Won't work for me, though, because I *also* have some mp3 files that
don't have flac equivalents. A smart playlist for flac files would hide these.

I really need some notion of cross-format file equality and the ability
to set format preference in the presence of duplicates.

I tried segregating tracks by format, but this only brought up a new issue.
Recall that my file structure is that each CD I have stored on line is
represented as a directory that contains all the tracks in both flac & mp3
format, plus some metadata information:
    albums/
      let-it-bleed/
        *.flac
	*.mp3
	metadata
      darkside-moon/
        *.flac
	*.mp3
	metadata

So I made two brother dirs next to albums, albums.mp3 & albums.flac.
They are link farms replicating the structure of albums/, but segregated
by format. This is easy to set up:

    albums/

    albums.mp3/
      let-it-bleed/
	*.mp3	(symlinks to ../albums/let-it-bleed/*.mp3)
      darkside-moon/
	*.mp3	(symlinks to ../albums/darkside-moon/*.mp3)

    albums.flac/
      let-it-bleed/
	*.flac	(symlinks to ../albums/let-it-bleed/*.flac)
      darkside-moon/
	*.flac	(symlinks to ../albums/darkside-moon/*.flac)

Now I can import albums.flac into my rhythmbox, and will see only the
flac files. Plus it will load quickly, without the metadata text files
that give rhythmbox conniptions.

But there is a problem with this setup: now I can't use rhythmbox to manage
my ipod. To do that, I need to see the mp3 files that live in albums.mp3/.
Rhythmbox seems only willing to handle a single on-disk repository.
  - If I include both mp3s & flac files in the repository, I'll see every song
    twice and it'll be unusably awkward to play music.
  - If I store only the flacs in the repository, I can't see the mp3 files
    I'd like to be moving onto my ipod.
  - If I store only the mp3s in the repository, I can't play the hi-res flacs
    on my stereo system.
What I need is the ability to have two different repositories in Rhythmbox, 
say Library and Library-mp3s. That, or the ability to have Rhythmbox
hide/unhide duplicates based on some format criteria:
    - when playing music, I set things so that flac is preferred.
    - when frobbing my ipod, I switch to a mode where mp3 is preferred.

As things stand, I think I am concluding that Rhythmbox is not suitable for
someone with my use case.

   From: shivers ccs neu edu
   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.

   From: "Jason Bodnar" <jason shakabuku org>
   I have 80GBs of mp3 tracks, similar organization to yours, but just mp3, no
   flac or metadata files and it takes only a couple of minutes to import.

Yes, it is only slow when there are text files mixed in with the media files.

    -Olin