Re: Common music database?

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

James "Doc" Livingston wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 15:01 +0200, Milosz Derezynski wrote:
> > For example in BMP experimental (the `bmpx' repository in our SVN), we
> > use, as i've already said, a relation type library and hence there's
> > no much use for us for an SQL or SQL based, or otherwise query based
> > external system apart from the _raw storage_. 
> >
> > Tracker again isn't just raw storage, it's somewhat more, and i dare
> > to say that any player that would want to make full use of Tracker as
> > the (shared) metadata/database backend would have to either sacrifice
> > a lot of own features it supports, or have really a lot of very
> > whacked and very weird code (as bindings always tend to have a lot of
> > blood and bonesplitter in them).
>
> This begs the question "What do we want a common music database /for/?".
>
> As I see it, the primary goal is to share the "per-user metadata" like
> ratings, play counts, tags/categories et al. Which lets users change
> music players and not loose all their information.
>
>
> With that in mind, Tracker could provide the raw storage for the common
> database. When an app starts up, it could say "give me all the tracks
> and metadata" and watch for later changes. When the any of the data
> changes in the app, it would push it out to Tracker.
>
> If an app wants to use Tracker as it's entire database layer, great -
> but I don't see any of the existing apps doing that in the near future.
>
>
> I'm not sure where everyone else stands on how much stuff should be
> common in the "common database", but that's my 2c.

Okay if this is the way you want to go then I will need to know what 
Dbus calls you would like for the common operations that would be 
performed. Having these operations clearly defined allows me to optimise 
things and makes it dead easy for you guys to make use of it.

Another thing I need is what additional common metadata is needed in the 
Audio section of the spec :
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshared_2dfilemetadata_2dspec

(some of you already mentioned "playcount". Another might be 
Audio.Lyrics if I can get Tracker to download lyrics for a music file 
when its indexed!)


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/