GSoC Draft Proposal

[Ryan Zeigler]

>  Perhaps a more noble end pursuit would be the
> implementation of media device synchronisation, as this has never been
> a feature in Amarok. I'm not sure how much street cred you would get
> for a proposal which simply reimplements existing functionality from
> Amarok 1.4. Syncing a device is not a trivial objective, and would be
> well received by the community.

I feel much more enthusiastic about this than say, caching databases or even 
the second collection provider backend. I also feel a little sheepish for not 
thinking of that since I have previously thought it would be awesome if 
Amarok had such a feature.
I would think that the goals of locally cached databases and the second 
provider backend would be best replaced with 1 way and bi-directional 
synchronizing among all collections that support writing. I would also want 
it to be clever synchronization, based perhaps on the metadata in each track, 
but in such a way that for instance the tracks marked "blink-182/She Likes Me 
For Me"  (on media device) and  "Blink 182/She likes me mor me" (in local 
collection) would be treated as the same track, and not result in a transfer.
I also was thinking it might be great to define preference orders for 
filetypes in different collections. I.E. when doing synchronization, if a 
local collections contains a FLAC file, I wouldn't want to overwrite it with 
a mp3 file with the same attributes, whereas I would want to overwrite it on 
a portable device were space might be limited.
Thoughts?
Ryan