AFT in 2.0 (was: Re: Kamion migration and backup tool)

[Jeff Mitchell]

On Thursday 11 October 2007, Dan Meltzer wrote:
> On 10/11/07, Jeff Mitchell <kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com> wrote:
> > On Saturday 06 October 2007, Ian Monroe wrote:
> > > *what you'd really want to migrate and backup is in the MySQL,
> > > PostgreSQL or sqlite database in the statistics table. Thanks to file
> > > tracking we don't have to worry about if the users put the file in a
> > > different location really on different computers.
> >
> > Speaking of file tracking, that'll have to get sorted at some point for
> > 2.0. It'll have to be totally rewritten, considering the original
> > implementation was heavily integrated into MetaBundle and CollectionDB 
> > :-)  ...except for the basic algorithm (which is the hard part anyways,
> > really).  Just another thing to tick up on our TODO list.
>
> Would it make sense to use musicbrainz UUID here to identify tracks
> rather than our own method?  It seems like musicbrainz UUID is become
> a commonly used method of identifying a unique track, xspf supports
> it, xesam supports it, and I think some forms of metadata support it.

Perhaps.  There are a few drawbacks though.

The first is that AFAIK, it attempts to fingerprint files and then figure out 
what file it really is.  This fingerprinting probably has to read/hash the 
entire file.  One of the reasons AFT was so unobtrusive was that it was 
extremely fast to calculate but with good results.

It also means another dependency that must be compiled in, and not one that I 
think many people really care about or many packagers will really require, in 
order for it to work.  AFT in stable has no dependencies.

Also it only works for mp3/vorbis/cd media, again, AFAIK.  AFT worked for any 
file that you could have in your collection.

I've also heard that the libraries are buggy and are not maintained well and 
prone to breakage.  In fact, Amarok stable doesn't compile against the 
version of tunepimp/musicbrainz installed on my computer, which are the only 
versions Gentoo has.

So together all this leads me to think that using musicbrainz as the basis for 
file tracking is not a great idea.  But feel free to enlighten me if I got 
something wrong.

--Jeff