Hi all, New to this list, but a great admirer of some of the elegance I've seen coming out of the suckless community. Apologies for a very long first post, but it's because I'm trying to help a lot? We'll go with that. Also, double apologies if this ought to go elsewhere. It seemed like a proposal that would fit in well with the current set of suckless programs and others on this list might be interested in it.
In what began as a sort of rage against the immense suckiness of rhythmbox, banshee, clementine, itunes, etc. etc., I've been thinking about writing a music db management program that would do just that. Existing software is so awful and agglomerative that almost anything would be better, so all the more reason for caution at the beginning. I know plenty of people probably just happily/unhappily use fs organization + mplayer. Awesome if that works for you. It used to, but the niceness of not having to use crap was finally outweighed by the awkwardness of this method and its distance from hardware players. Here's what I'm thinking so far: 1) There is no actual "music database" that's updated. There is just a cache db which automatically indexes the metadata embedded in music files. The tags on the file are always authoritative. 2) There is one configurable location with music files. If a user needs them in more than one place, they can use symlinks. By default this is just ~/Music. 3) The music folder is watched. The cache is updated/invalidated automatically when a file is altered or a new file/folder is added anywhere. This should be easy/lightweight enough with inotify, although other more portable suggestions are welcome so long as they don't involve something hideous that pulls in all of gnome. On startup the whole shebang will have to be reindexed, but careful use of stored mtimes, background reindexing, plus a fallback start-with-clear-cache flag should keep this from getting too out of hand. 4) Support for meta-tags, like "artist" that are present everywhere but differ in id3v1, the several id3v2s, flac, etc. Access to any tag directly by name when that is needed. 5) Sorting. Searching. This could potentially be done through straight sql (and use of sqlite), but then I don't like sql much, so...yeah. I suppose this will likely just have key--regex--sortkey/prevsortkey/prevprevsortkey/etc. It would be nice to be completely general, but that would involve the creation of a sql-like language that isn't awkward for 98% of actual queries. 6) Display. Needs to be graphical bc of embedded pictures. But should be only one view: a simple table with configurable columns corresponding to tags/metatags. Album art is a column in the table just like everything else. If someone wants some itunes-like album picture list view (and don't get me wrong, I kinda like that), there should be a separate chooser program that gives that view and nothing else. 7) Editing. Undecided. Could be simple double click on a field makes it editable. Better might be an interactive sed-like regex, but this has the potential to totally wreck massive numbers of files very quickly. Any way about it I can't completely depend on analogy to sed/ed/vi/whatever, as there's images to consider. Anything more automagically complicated than opening a file chooser for images is immediately barred as something to be implemented in a separate program, if at all. 8) Playback. No playback. But can launch a specified command with a group of files based on a search/sort. 9) Organize files. No file organization, but I'll likely build a separate commandline program that arranges the filesystem based on tag. Actually, this is the only part that I've started. 10) Sync. Should be able to manually sync with libgpod or libmtp supported devices. As in: search, sync results with device x. Automatic sync of a complex search should be supported through shell scripts. Not decided, but atm I feel like taking files *from* these devices is separate enough to jettison. Questions: 1) Most of these types of programs are now media rather than music management programs. Does anybody actually want this? I'm all for more generality if it can be done with minimal added complexity and in a way which actually results in more simplicity, rather than just idiotic agglomeration. But I suspect this is just agglomeration. Nobody tags movies, AFAIK. 2) Toolkit? Is swk ready for a project like this? Is gtk2 too sucky? I love C. A lot. But it may not be the best for quick, simple GUI development (yet!). Fallback is either tcl/tk, or Python+tkinter. Actually in all likelihood I'll use Python+tkinter, but I want to explore other options first. 3) Suggestions on being more simple? Can this be usefully partitioned into more than one app? Can I usefully not do some of this? I'm open to just having a few command line tag/copy/etc programs, too, but somehow the task of music management would need to be made as fast as using something like Clementine is, on the rare occasions that it actually works and does what you want instead of simplifying in all the wrong places and then crashing. Really, my preferred way of doing this would have been to just write a FUSE filesystem and call it a day. Filesystems and databases have always seemed redundant to me. The trouble is that actually quite a few tags have "/" embedded in them, so this is not really workable atm. Why shells/filesystems/tools didn't long ago provide for full binary filename support with escape sequences is beyond me. 4) Suggestions on programs which already do all or a portion of this? Possible reusable crossovers to other projects? It strikes me that 90% of this could be implemented as a completely generic interactive key--value database editor. But I'm not sure the glue and special cases for the other 10% (cache vs. db, plus the extra variable of a file corresponding to a data set) is worth it. Caveats: Just (!) that I'm in a PhD program and should be doing that instead of thinking about this. And probably randomly will. For months at a time. But it's possible that with a good, simple starting design and judicious use of existing libraries this could be a pretty quick development process. Especially with help. Any way about it, if enough people are interested I'm fine taking more of a background role, anything from co-maintainer to mindless (but shiftless) slave. I just want to never use Rhythmbox/clementine/banshee/etc. ever again. For whoever made it this far, thank you! -Evan
