Adding multimedia-related features to Baloo

[Denis Steckelmacher]

On 03/14/2014 03:03 PM, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> my dream world for multimedia and semantic search has always been to eliminate
> collection management duplication. it never happened with the Nepomuk backends
> because they had too much overhead and so application developers stayed away
> from using it. but baloo could change all that :)
>
> as a user what i would *LOVE* is to have the following items stored in the
> semantic search store so that it is easily fetchable by any application:
>
> * playlists: these exist both in playlist files on disk as well as in app-
> specific configurations/databases
> * recently played (individual tracks, collections (e.g. albums, for music) and
> playlists)
> * play frequency stats
> * scheduled lists (ala youtube's "watch later")
>
> this would allow things like the following user story:
>
> ***
> Aaron opens his laptop, creates a playlist of music and starts it playing Juk.
> Happy with the mix, he adds it to the "listen later" list. During the
> afternoon, Aaron watches some videos online in a web browser and uses the
> Share Like Connect tool to add some of the videos to "watch later". He takes
> his laptop over to a friend's that evening and plugs it into their home
> theater system, starts Plasma Mediacenter and goes to the "Play later" page
> which shows the videos and his playlist. Aaron presses "play" and the night
> begins.
> ***
>
> this kind of thing is already possible with online services, but they only
> work within that one service and tend to be rather limited. still, i use those
> features on a regular basis ... and i'd love something similar in KDE
> software. semantic search could provide the single source, and baloo is
> absolutely fast enough to take this on.


Whoaaaa ! After having read your user story, I thought "I want this". 
This would in fact be wonderful for the users. Moreover, if Baloo is 
able to put its database on removable media (so that your USB stick 
contains your music and your metadata), then it should be possible to 
insert an USB stick containing your music collection and its metadata in 
the computer of a friend and be able to open Juk and play your favorite 
songs there.

Just a small technical question about playlists: do they need to be 
manually ordered? Playlists could easily be implemented using tags 
(assign tags to your songs and find they back by searching for one tag), 
but the list of files corresponding to a tag has no definite order.