Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Classical Music or Audiobooks on Rhythmbox

[Kevin Hunter <hunteke earlham edu>]

At 8:19a -0400 on Mon, 14 Jul 2008, Jonathan Matthew wrote:
>> If I then click on Genre, it orders the entire viewable collection by
>> genre.  This is *sometimes* what I want, but other times I want to order
>> by the Artist, and then within each artist, order by the genre.
> 
> On what basis do you make this determination?  Is there some information
> you get out of the artist->genre sort ordering that isn't available
> otherwise?

Thought the example is slightly contrived, the problem that the feature
would solve for me is one of "too much data".  I have lotsa music.  When
I have a tune in mind and can only think of the genre, and the rough
place in the alphabet, I'm currently screwed with Rhythmbox.  All that
sub-ordering does for me is allow me to put both of those pieces of
information together.

[Reorder for discussion sake]
> Rhythmbox will not be SQL-based any time soon.  It'll take a hell of a
> lot of work, and a tiny bit more justification than apparent ease of
> sorting query results.

Heh, I can't give you that justification either, but since I'm a big fan
of SQL in general, I'll try!  ;-)

I remember reading somewhere (on Rhythmbox FAQ, maybe?) an argument that
a list of songs is not relational, so it's silly to outsource to a
database.  I can argue that a couple of ways:

1. Each song maintains it's own data (id3/ogg tags), and exists
independent of a collection.  Therefore, it's best to load each song's
data fresh from the disk and create a collection in memory.

2. On the other hand, once you're already saving Rhythmbox-specific
information across sessions and about an entire collection for quick
loading and other collection-specific tasks (rhythmdb.xml), the question
is who should do the work?  Should Rhythmbox devs maintain code that to
a large extent is just string and record manipulation?  I would argue not.