Abstract idea of Song instead of pure file management

[Casey Link]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Jud Craft <craftjml at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah.  I stand corrected.
>
> Another benefit of doing tag-only matching is the speed of
> development.  It provides an easy way to begin prototyping the ability
> of the database to abstract song files.
>
> With two possible mechanisms for comparison (tag-matching and
> deep-song-analysis), the former is very quickly implemented, though of
> course it has slightly different functionality and use cases from the
> latter.
>
> Which means you can quite quickly move past the "How can I compare two
> files?" and more to the "Now how will our database manage these
> files?"  Later, a song-analysis comparison mechanism could be added to
> give additional functionality to the song comparison backend.

You addressed a point I was going to make: the
"same-song-different-album" issue. That is definitely a drawback of
the algorithmic analysis.

And yes, this is just an idea I've been baking in the back of my mind,
it's definitely not on an official future feature (though it will be
if I can see to it).

Let's brainstorm a little. What's the best UI design for this feature?

Will the user want to view the different formats he has for a
particular song? How would this work?
Perhaps another level in the tree view:  Artist > Album > Track > Formats
Maybe that is too cluttered?

How would a user manually associate or disassociate two songs?
Disassociate doesn't seem that hard, a simple context action (right
click) menu would do the job. Maybe Ctrl+selecting the tracks to
associate and then another context action?

Casey