Improving user experience: managing music on multiple volumes

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Ivan,

Thanks a lot for your mail. I will cut out large pieces to only reply
to what is relevant to Amarok:

On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:24 PM,  <i.ivanov at epfl.ch> wrote:
> Hello team,
>
> As I was authorised to spam you (details below), I am writing this e-mail..
> As a reply to Edward, I may say what Mr Schneier said about Cloud: This is
> your data on somebody else's hard drive. I believe, as a user I should have
> the right and the means to control the flow of my personal data (yes, even
> the music playlists and the related usage metadata), and I may prefer not to
> use cloud.

I fully agree with you, I also prefer to have my data where I can
control it, and I am also quite unlikely to use the cloud to store my
data.

...
> ----- Forwarded message from hades at hades.name -----
>     Date: Thu, 1 May 2014 11:15:28 +0200
>...
> Your idea appeals greatly to me personally, since I have a large music
> library and often listen to the music with my laptop.
>
> However, currently the world is trending towards cloud services (like
> Google Play Music) and mobile devices. In couple of years, the number of
> smartphones and tablets will double, and the number of desktops and
> laptops is going to remain the same.
>
> So, unfortunately I must say that in appreciating your idea I am quite
> outdated :).

Edward is certainly right as well, as a lot of users will use the
cloud instead of local storage, but all that is a matter of personal
choice.

...

> On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:49:14PM +0200, i.ivanov at epfl.ch wrote:
...

(mentally changing all mentions of iTunes to Amarok in the following text)
>>
>> I would like to share with you my idea: it is about playing music form
>> different physical volumes, some of which aren't permanently attached
>> to the computer. Let's assume that we have MBP with small SSD, and a
>> large external HDD (or NAS). All the music in ALAC format is present
>> on the external disk, and some of the music is on the local disk, in a
>> compressed format.
>> The idea is that iTunes checks if the external volume is present. If
>> yes, and if the song we want to play exists on the local HDD with
>> lower bitrate as well as on the external disk with a higher bitrate -
>> the better one (higher bitrate) is selected automatically (in the
>> playlist however there is only one item). There should be an
>> indication what is the file format and the bitrate of the song
>> currently being played.
>> If at launch (or after a user command for re-checking the availability
>> of the volumes) iTunes see that the external disk is not present, only
>> the playlist with existing items is displayed (i. e. only items
>> pointing to files on local disk).

Amarok already checks if a collection storage is available or not, the
only thing that it currently doesn't is distinguish between different
qualities of a track with the same file type, the only distinction I
am aware of is different file types.
But with the use case: if you have low quality only as mp3/Ogg and
high quality only stored as FLAC/wav,  Amarok is perfectly able to
distinguish the files, as those are seen as different files, and with
the current database scheme it will only display the available tracks,
both in the Collection Browser and the Playlist.

Not sure if distinguishing files with the same file type by bitrate is
really a needed addition to Amarok, but others may have a different
opinion about this :) I presume it would add additional complexity to
the database/code, but I am not a developer and can't really judge
that.

So currently what Amarok already does is totally sufficient for me, as
I do store high quality music in FLAC format only (with a few wav
files still lying around), and low quality in Ogg, ev. mp3 if I want
to play it on a media player not capable of playing Ogg. I personally
fail to see the need to have different bitrates of a track with the
same file type, either it is compressed or it is not.


Regards, Myriam
-- 
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