Concept of "hashing" stings in Amarok (sih1)

[Jakob Kummerow]

> In fact, we've always over the years gotten emails asking for *more*
> specificity, which is why we recently switched the database to be
> case-sensitive. People *want* to know when they have both AC-DC and
> AC/DC so that they can fix their tags.

I concur that fixing your tags is a more robust long-term solution.
Especially when fetching covers/lyrics/Wikipedia articles or whatever,
it doesn't help at all if Amarok internally knows that "AC/DC" and
"acdc" are probably the same band; rather, when requesting stuff from
external services, Amarok must provide the exact correct spelling
(unless the other side also employs a "sih1"-like algorithm).

So, to make sih1 (or similar ideas) really useful, it would need to be
established as an internet-wide standard - which is probably about as
easy as just establishing correctly spelled tags as a standard ;-)

One point where I do see its usefulness is in a (standalone?) tagging
application, where such an algorithm can be used to present the user a
group of tracks that are *probably* performed by the same artist,
giving the user the chance to correct the tags accordingly. But from
my POV, it's at least debatable whether it would be a good idea to
integrate that directly into Amarok.

Cheers
Jakob