GSoC proposal idea: distributed music collection

[Pavel Shved]

Hell-o.

Since mobile device support are a good candidate for GSoC, I'd 
like to present yet another idea about it.  If you find it worthy, the 
proposal's text won't make you wait.

The proposal is to make collection distributed, identifying songs by metadata 
and attaching a set of providers to each song, the provider being either 
available or not at every point of time.  The provider is a hard drive, 
flash-drive, ipod, CD or any other device, on which the file is located.  
Also several files on the same device may provide the song.

Collection would then store all tracks, whenever their provider is attached, 
but the user has the possibility to filter the collection by provider and/or 
availability of one.  Availability filter would allow Amarok to automatically 
scan the devices being attached.  Also the user can check, where the song he 
heard comes from. 

The work to be done involves creating of song identification algorithm 
(common ID3 + special tricks, CDDA for audio CD's, for example), extending 
collection infrastructure and experimenting with devices.

You may find the related idea in proposals section of official website: 
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Proposals/Song_Abstraction:2.0

The further extension of this idea involves turning Amarok from collection 
_viewer_ into collection _manager_ which also allows user to automatically 
create instances of songs from collection (in addition to reading songs 
only), the directory structure being automatically created and the songs 
being possibly re-encoded.  Don't know whether it's acceptable for Amarok or 
necessary to make this proposal capable to win.

-----------------
Pavel Shved.