[Shotwell] About adding support for recorded audio files

[Adam Dingle]

Tobias,

On 12/05/2010 11:54 AM, Tobias Rapp wrote:
> Hello,
>
> this is some rather long mail that aims to discuss about the idea to add
> support for handling audio files in Shotwell. This might sound as an
> inappropriate (or better: crazy) feature request for a photo manager
> application but I will try to explain why this makes more sense to me
> than just stick to using Rhythmbox (or some other music manager).

Thanks for the suggestion and for your explanation of why this could be 
useful.  We haven't thought so much about audio in Shotwell before, but 
as you've pointed out, if you want to organize audio by recording 
date/time, event name and so on then Shotwell could actually make sense.

> Finally my main question is not if *you* will add support for audio
> recordings in Shotwell but rather if you would accept patches that
> implement this feature. Not sure if I will get an initial test version
> up and running soon, though. Maybe there are other developers that are
> interested in working on this feature, too?

Yes, I think we would accept patches.  I think that audio support will 
probably never be a primary goal of the Shotwell project, but for all 
the reasons you've described it would be nice for it to work.  I've 
ticketed this here:

http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2920

For 0.8 we've done a lot of work to generalize Shotwell to support both 
photos and video, and with that infrastructure in place I think that 
adding support for another media type shouldn't be impossibly hard.

By the way, here's a one-line hack to make Shotwell (the trunk version) 
work with audio files today.  In VideoSupport.vala, find the function 
get_supported_file_extensions() in the VideoReader class.  It contains 
this line:

         string[] result = { "avi", "mpg", "mov", "mts", "ogg", "ogv", 
"mp4" };

Add any audio extensions you like to this list (e.g. "mp3"), then 
rebuild Shotwell.  Voila - you can now import your mp3 files into 
Shotwell.  They'll show up on the Videos page and in events.  When you 
double-click one, Shotwell will open Totem to play them, just like for 
videos.  Yes, possibly a useful hack!

Of course, this isn't the right solution since audio files should really 
be listed separately, not as videos.  And, a disclaimer: if you take 
this approach and then we come out with actual audio support some day, 
you might need to rebuild your library since Shotwell probably won't be 
smart enough to recognize that all those audio files you imported as 
videos should no longer appear as videos.  Still, this is the low-effort 
solution: it will effectively give you the feature you want today, I think.

adam