Re: Common music database?

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

So I have a question.  Let's say that I have my hard drive all index'd;
added a bunch of tags and so forth.  Now, I got myself one of those
pocket drives, and I want to copy my music from my hard drive to my pen
drive or whatever, and listen to it at work.  How would my metadata,
including my tags move with me?

sri

On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 20:02 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Joe Shaw wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 14:58 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> >> Tracker is significantly different from Beagle. Beagle AFAIK is just an 
> >> indexer whereas Tracker is a combination Database/Indexer (the embedded 
> >> mysql also being a combo database/indexer).
> > 
> > This is the case right now, although the goal for Beagle has also been
> > to act as metadata storage.
> > 
> > These days, though, I'm not sure that's really the right way to go.
> > Ideally you'd associate metadata with the file itself (probably via
> > extended attributes) if you can.  
> 
> Thats obviously problematic  (permissions, NFS, EAs not present/enabled 
> etc). But for me the killer to this is non-file objects like contacts as 
> tracker allows all its services to have arbitrary metadata defined 
> including keywords/tags against it so obviously that would not be 
> possible with EAs.
> 
> The other issue is how you separate the useless junk from the 
> interesting stuff (how will you know that a certain user defined 
> metadata needs to be indexed?) and then there's the lack of datatypes of 
> the metadata that would be present in EA's too.
> 
> For tracker, you can register a new metadata type for anything but we 
> also need to know its datatype (if its indexable string, a non-index 
> string, a numeric value or a datetime value) as they are stored/indexed 
> differently.
> 
> This is probably less of an issue for Beagle as I assume you are 
> hardcoding all your metadata (AFAIK Lucene's metadata is pre-set at 
> design time and is not extensible at run time?). I guess this is why KDE 
> and others use Sqlite for metadata whilst they use Lucene for full text 
> searches.
> 
> 
> External projects like Leaftag make me
> > increasingly think that the indexer isn't the right place to be storing
> > metadata, simply that it should pull it from external sources.
> 
> Well tracker is first and foremost a database and its goal is "one 
> database to rule them all"!
> 
> I understand LeafTag will support multiple backends and I intend having 
> Tracker as one of them.
> 
> The benefits of having one central DB are massive:
> 
> 1) Faster and much more memory efficient - eliminates platform bloat.
> 2) Allows effortless cross querying of all data and metadata (via RDF Query)
> 3) Turns all the data into first class objects which are extensible with 
> metadata (both derived and user defined)
> 4) Allows all objects to have keywords/tags applied to them
> 5) One consistent API to learn
> 6) Freedesktop. In theory it would allow you to change apps/desktops and 
> still retain all your data
> 
>  From http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero, Tracker fulfills some of the 
> goals (as well as first class objects) like:
> 
> *Introduce Metadata throughout the desktop
> 
> Which basically means a full semantic desktop.
> 
> > 
> > That doesn't mean that I couldn't be convinced otherwise, of course. :)
> > 
> 
> Well that depends on whether you would want to become a metadata DB 
> service (using sqlite and not lucene for the metadata) or alternatively 
> if you dont want to reinvent the wheel, integrate with Tracker (you 
> would need to fix the mono dbus bindings first though!).
> 
> One possibility is to have a gconf key in tracker that would pass all 
> full text search queries to libBeagle and disable all watching/indexing 
> being done by tracker (IE tracker would behave like a DB and not an 
> indexer). On the other end, Beagle would need to populate Tracker with 
> metadata whenever files changed (you would fire off async dbus calls so 
> it would not slow down beagle's indexing).
> 
> I would like to add Tracker to gnome at some point and avoiding a turf 
> war with beagle would be best for everyone (especially as Tracker offers 
> much more than indexing). It means we can get search, indexing and 
> powerful metadata capabilities into the core desktop and hopefully 
> change everything for the better (like having hierarchiless file dialogs 
> where apps simply state what mime types they want and tracker shows all 
> matching files - I really hate all the dumb manual navigation thats 
> needed at present!)
> 
> 
-- 
Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>