Portable database

[Bart Cerneels]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Sven Jacobs <sven.jacobs at web.de> wrote:
> Dear Amarok developers,
>
>  first of all thank you for this great piece of software! I have an idea
>  which may make Amarok even better:
>
>  My music collection is stored on an USB drive, a scenario which is quite
>  common nowadays. The problem is that I'm using my music collection on
>  several computers and plug the drive in where it's needed (notebook,
>  home center PC et cetera). Since Amarok stores the database in the users
>  home directory there's no central database for my collection. All
>  settings and statistics from one database are not available in the other
>  and vice versa. As you can imagine this is quite annoying and the reason
>  I haven't really using such fine features like song ratings yet.
>
>  My suggestion is that Amarok should also be capable of storing the
>  database in the root folder of the music collection on the portable
>  media. Let's say the collection is stored in /media/myusbdrive/music
>  then the database could be placed in /media/myusbdrive/music/.amarok
>  when in "portable mode". You still have to configure the locations of
>  your music within Amarok but once it finds a portable database within
>  one of these locations, it's using it for this directory and all
>  subdirectories.
That is very easy to do in Amarok 2 thanks to the Collection
Framework. It basicly means an extension of the Generic Media Device
with an sqlite or similar database that will be saved on the volume
itself.
>
>  This could be a nice project for Google's Summer of Code ;)
I think it would, it's also a good test for the Collection Framework
usability for media devices. So while the adding the database to
GenericMediaDevice might not enough for a summer project, extending,
debugging and stress testing the Collection Framework will certainly
be a big part of the SoC.
Bart