Music Collection Issues

[Joshua Booth]

I understand that the maintainers of Amarok don't want to see it turn into a
gigantic program for managing a music collection, but it is halfway there
anyway.  It already uses a database backend, allows for transcoding,
organization and movement of files, and burns CD's.  But it still has some
issues that seem to be hard to solve without some backend changes.  Let me
catalog the issues I see:

Transcoding:

* Transcoding takes a long time (that can't be changed), but doesn't save
the results except on the device.  (If it does, I haven't used it)

* Even if transcoding did save the results, they would be listed next to the
originals, and would be indistinguishable anyway
  Ex: Coldplay
         Parachutes
            Don't Panic  (Is this one the FLAC or the MP3?)
            Don't Panic  (What about this one?)
            Shiver       (This means that Amarok cannot truly be given
access to my entire collection)
            Shiver
  If I add all tracks from the album, it plays the FLACs and the MP3s!

* If the transcoded files were saved in another place, how would Amarok know
to use them again?  They aren't in the database!

So this implies that the same songs in different formats should be treated
the same.  But then, Amarok needs to know to play the highest quality
format, but transfer a compatible format to an MP3 player.

Organization:

* Non-library filing is annoying--Not everything should be filed under T!
  Ex: "The Smashing Pumpkins" should be filed under S, not T

* There should be some kind of "flexible view" that displays the standard
Artist/Album/Track format when appropriate, but Album/Track format when
displaying compilation albums.

Collection Management:

* I know that Amarok is not supposed to manage your collection, but once you
added transcoding, organization and burning, it basically wants to.

* Why not integrate k3b's ripper into it?  I recently ripped all of my CD's
to FLAC (using k3b), then transcoded the FLACs to MP3 for use on my MP3
player.  And I had to use two programs to do that, one of which is alread a
transcoder (soundKonverter).

I know that very frequently, people post onto this list with some complaint
about tagging, organization, or duplication of files.  My personal gripe is
that if you have two files that literally are the same song, but in
different formats, they are placed one after another, instead of displaying
only one of them.  But you have to admit that it needs some kind of
consistent collection management mechanism.

I don't know how much I can help, since I don't know too much about
databases and Qt and KDE, but I would like to help some.  I do have a few
ideas for solutions, though:

* Map artists to a number, and then store those numbers in the database
instead of the textual names.
    - This lets you use a heuristic to combine "The Goo Goo Dolls" with "Goo
Goo Dolls"

* Associate some kind of "encoding type" with each file (MP3, FLAC, OGG,
etc), and have Amarok play the highest quality encoding type of that file.

* When transferring files to an MP3 player, try to transfer the appropriate
"encoding type".  If it doesn't exist, transcode it.

* If you do integrate a CD ripper, have it rip to several "encoding types",
so that you can have an archive version (FLAC) and a portable version (MP3).

I've looked through the collection source code, but I'm still not sure how
much this would break the current system.
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