Hi,

I\'ve been using Amarok for a while now and think it is by far and away the nicest player I have found.

I\'ve done a fair bit of development on MythMusic in order to support compilation artists nicely (I was originally introduced to Amarok by someone on the Myth-Devel list).

(This is probably going to be a long post, but please persevere!)

I really like the way Amarok handles Various Artists, but accept the caveats that people have highlighted here on the list.

I have many albums that are \"mixed\" by specific DJ which I feel is a little unfair to just dump them under Various Artists. A perfect example of this is LTJ Bukem (if anyone has heard of him) where he mixes songs by other artists. The Another Late Night/Late Night Tales/Back To Mine series of albums are other good examples.

This raises two problems in amarok, 1. for Another Late Night etc. only one album is listed in the Cover Manager, despite me having about 7 separate albums all called the same thing. 2. There is no way to credit the Album Artist or to search on this.

I have done my best to include support for this in MythMusic, by having a specific tag for it. I use the TPE4 ID3v2 field to represent this infomation or the COMPILATION_ARTIST in Vorbis Comments.

If I want an album listed as Various Artists I put that text literally into the TPE4 field etc. I have some logic in the code that will sort out the heirarchy view of your music based on the presence of this tag.



Anyway, I use MythMusic in my living room and Amarok on my PC. They both serve different purposes but share a few common features, such as scores, playcounts, configurable heirarchy views etc. Regardless of these two programs working together, one thing that Linux will always have is choice; there will always be a few players/managers that people want to use, and most will have a common set of base features.

So this got me thinking how about developing a Metadata Librarian. A network-transparent database that holds all the metadata about your music collection. Any program that wants to tie into this can do so with the inclusion of a simple client library. The librarian can store default peferences for heirarchy views and process file based metadata updating etc, making client programs much simpler. Of course such a program may be overkill in certain circumstances, so I would also envisage the ablity to link a companion library that would be able to perform all the file based metadata updating and local database querying via an identical API so that the client program can be written in a single consistant way such that there is maximum flexibility.

If I were to start such a project, do other people think it would be a useful addition? I\'ve tried to outline the required features below as I see them. I would undertake the changes needed to MythMusic if this is supported (although I may have a hard time convincing the Myth Devs as new dependancies tend to get frowned upon, although I think I can combat this by including the necessary libs in the MythMusic CVS tree and adjusting the build process accordingly!)

Thanks for any feedback and thanks for reading such a long post from a noob on this forum.


Metadata Librarian:
- A deamon based program.
- Network transparent (e.g. TCP or UDP/IP)
- Database of metadata (e.g. MySQL/PostgreSQL) including Lyrics/Album Art/Artist Art/Artist Bios etc.
- Global preferences for common features such as heirarchical views etc.
- Individual client based preferences for featurs such as heirarchical views so that the same data can be accessed differently from the global setup if desired.
- Support for scores/playcounts/etc. for tracks
- Support for file path equivalents for when a the audio player client and Metadata Librarian server are on separate machines with different paths/mount points to the audio data.
- Be the definitive source of audio metadata with file (ID3/Vorbis Comment etc) updating capabilities (a task that can be off loaded from the client audio application).
- Ability to be linked directly into an application such that it can work without a Metadata Librarian deamon/server, although retain an identical API such that it could work with a central system via simple configuarion options that could be incorporated into the application.

OK I think that covers most of my thoughts at the moment.

I\'d really appreciate feedback on this. If I get some good feedback here and from the Myth Mailing lists I\'ll start me a little project and see hw far I can take it. If any developers like the idea of this and want to help then please let me know also.

You can mail me directly on: metalibrarian aht colin d0t guthr d0t ie

Cheers guys and keep up the good work on Amarok.

Colin

Forgot to say that the MetaLibrarian should also be able to store playlists/smart playlists, both globally and per client.

If user authentication needs to sneek in there then there could also be per user storage for things like this.

Thoughts?

Col