[Feedback] Request: A way to locally sort artists under same name
Jeff Mitchell
kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com
Mon Jun 25 03:22:25 UTC 2007
On Sunday 24 June 2007, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> Mostly replying because I think Jeff was too harsh rather than because I
> think such a feature is important.
>
> > It's not a "pirate function". If you share your legally obtained
> > music with others over a home network in a media server type setup
>
> Jeff: This is technically illegal.
>
> Not in most countries.
It's true. In most countries in the world, there is basically no copyright
system. Also no clean water.
> > then you might want to keep other people on the network from editing
> > the files and messing up the tags. Or, if you have a read-only disc
> > burned and mounted because your hard drive is full, you may want to be
> >
> > able to change an incorrect tag that was mistakenly left on the disc.
>
> Jeff: Or you could reburn a proper CD later and never have to worry
> about it again,
> Jeff: even if you lose your database.
>
> You only addressed the CD example. For instance, my wife accesses our
> music collection using a program less flexible than Amarok (iTunes, as
> it happens). If I were to fix tags in Amarok then her access would be
> broken and so, from my perspective, the music is read-only. It seems
> fairly reasonable that many people might have read-only access to a
> shared music server (at work perhaps, or a kid the parents think might
> accidentially corrupt the music).
You didn't address my comment about losing the database. On top of all this
code -- and user interface -- complexity, all these changes become tied to
the database, which tend to be more fragile than we'd really like.
I also don't understand why you fixing tags would break your wife's access to
music. If iTunes is reliant on tags to play a file, which I didn't think was
the case, then it's crap and you should use something else. Most players are
instead reliant on the path of a file.
I don't see the point in trying to justify this use-case with an artificial
example, and I still don't see how, in general, this is a big problem. If
you have access to a read-only share, then it's up to the admin of the share
to tag how they like it, and if you have a problem with their tagging, figure
out a common method. If you have a CD-ROM, reburn it. Both of these are
easier than a tag overlay.
> > Though this can be used to aide illegal downloading, sure, it also has
> >
> > several legit use cases.
>
> Jeff: Haven't figured one out yet.
>
> Well, for instance, a lot of lectures are available in creative commons
> and distributed by bittorrent. It would be pretty reasonable to share
> them, and want to 'correct' the tags in Amarok without changing the
> original. For instance you might want to tag it as 'lecture' or 'open
> source' where the original was tagged as 'podcast'.
Then retag them as you like and either back up the originals, or re-download
them if you want the original tags. Or write down what the original
genre/comment/whatever was. This is still the scenario I spoke of where you
don't have thousands of separate sources for one piece of media, you have one
source that is replicated thousands of times, and so you have a central
authority that tagged it how they felt proper. If you want to modify it but
don't want to share the modifications, don't share the modified files, share
the originals.
> I personally believe another layer over your music file system would add
> far more complexity than tbe small benefits given above. That said, I
> think there would be benefits.
Sure, every piece of functionality that could be added would have some
benefits. It'd be swell to have a button where every time you click it it
keeps a running counter of how many beers you've drunk this week.
--Jeff
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