~ryanlowe/blog: Revisiting AudioMan

Revisiting AudioMan

In my fourth year of the software engineering program at the University of Ottawa I worked with a team on a year-long project, starting in January. We decided to make a digital music organizer we named AudioMan that would allow people to manage their music collections on their computers. We finish this project on Friday.

Things have changed quite a bit since we started AudioMan back in January. iTunes for Windows is out and more companies have announced they will start selling digital music (Napster and Microsoft are just two examples).

So after talking with a few people about where this project could go in January I've come to a few semi-conclusions. Number one on the list is that AudioMan should not be a music player. There are enough great music players (WinAmp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, VLC) out there already and people have their favourite player.

Two, it could turn into a user-interface intensive application. By that I mean that a new user interface could affect how people organize their collections -- more graphical, dragging and dropping, etc. While I agree that eventually applications will move towards this, I don't think that people can get used to it in the near future (ie. let's wait for something like Avalon in Longhorn to catch on in 5 years). AudioMan should stay as a regular Windows-looking application so people won't have much trouble using it.

Where I see AudioMan fitting in is a multi-platform multi-format organization application. By multi-platform I'm referring to SWT's ability to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (and this support will continue to get better, so we should work on getting all three working and deployed at once). By multi-format I'm referring to all of these new file formats that will be in use in the next year. Apple has AAC. Microsoft has WMA. Napster has something else. And then there's still MP3, OGG, SHN and FLAC, just to name a few more. :) All of these formats will take a while to be supported by all vendors (and you can bet that some never will). People are going to WANT a SINGLE unified view of their music collection no matter where they bought the music from.

Number three is backups. If you buy a song from iTunes right now once you download it you have to take care of it. If you lose it in a hard drive crash you'll have to buy it again. As people start buying hundreds of dollars worth of music they'll want to be able to back up and keep track of it all and that includes removable media like writable CDs and DVDs. So they'll want to know a) if it's backed up and b) which disk(s) a particular song is on if they happen to want to play it. Songs stored over network connections should also be a big consideration.

So there are a few ideas I wanted to get down for people to read. Even if AudioMan doesn't eventually get used by a lot of people, it will still be a great test-bed for new software engineering techniques, quality testing, deployment, etc. So no doubt it will stick around. :) In the new year we'll get a team together and start working on AudioMan 1.0 .... who's in?

Posted at November 25, 2003 at 01:55 AM EST
Last updated November 25, 2003 at 01:55 AM EST

Comments

I like the back up notion. I remember an application about 5 - 6 years ago that kinda did just that (but not specifically for music) ... where you could back stuff up - but still search for it... with the results pointing you to which disk the stuff is located on.

I am also into playlist generators, but I have not looked into iTunes yet.

» Posted by: aforward at November 25, 2003 09:17 AM

Btw, good call on dropping the music player part ... although it seems like taking a feature away - you can really differentiate yourself...

But, exporting / importing playlists for manipulation would be nice.

» Posted by: aforward at November 25, 2003 09:18 AM

Yep, you should definitely check out how iTunes does the "static" and "dynamic" (so-called smart) playlists.

» Posted by: Ryan at November 25, 2003 11:04 AM

Renaming and moving files is another feature I would love. When you're trying to manage thousands of songs, it'ld be nice to sort by genre, and then "drag" the songs over to folder that you made for that genre. At that point, you should have a way of automatically updating all of the playlists, incase they're broken due to the fact that you moved files all over the place.

That kind of management should be done by the app, not the user.

» Posted by: roy at November 25, 2003 02:33 PM

Good point. When we were initially brainstorming AudioMan we thought about moving files around to organize the collection on the user's hard drive. Individual file renaming was easier and we almost implemented it for the project. File renaming will probably be one of the first things we'll put in.

It's easy enough to do what iTunes does: move everything into the user's home directory in a defined artist/album/track hierarchy. But what if people want to customize their own hierarchy?

Personally I don't like the way iTunes does it. What if the user's home directory runs out of space?!? The partition the home directories are on is usually the same one the operating system is on ... you reeeally don't want this one running out of free space!

It turned out that even after a few minutes of brainstorming we realised that managing all of these issues would be seriously complicated, so we de-scoped it.

That said, I think something automatic file system organization in AudioMan would be very nice. :)

» Posted by: Ryan at November 25, 2003 02:47 PM

I would definitely say add in actually moving around the files into AudioMan. That was basically the one thing that I wanted out of the entire project.. (and of course, it was de-scoped).

(Moving through the GUI and also batch re-naming based on a particular artist/track format..)

» Posted by: peter at November 26, 2003 10:27 AM

Other than things like id3v2 support, I would also add things like being able to search (ya, open bug, I know) and be able to sort by other things that we have in the files. Like, we know things like missing, desired, etc. tracks, I would like to sort by those.

Also drag-n-drop. That and "fill from file name".
;-)

» Posted by: Jim at November 26, 2003 11:33 PM

Looking for developers eh. Count me in. Looking for ideas, I always have a few to get rid of. Yet I am more interested in the software engineering aspects of the project development.

Regarding the file organization features, shouldn't that be up to the user? Ie I pick my hiearchy and where is should be or where part of it should be?

That's my two pence.

» Posted by: James at November 27, 2003 06:18 PM

James, that's the plan. Though the more customizable you make it, the more complicated it is for the developers and the users.

» Posted by: Ryan at November 27, 2003 07:07 PM

Just then mention of losing music to a hard drive crash brings back memories of a hard drive crash i had where I lost all my MP3's. I remember being not too mad at the whole thing, since i didn't really pay for any of it, i didn't really care that i had lost it. Just had to start downloading again.

I can see why apple doesn't let you download the songs again. They already make very little or no money off iTunes. Extra bandwidth from people downloading the song over and over again might be a little hard on their servers, and their wallets. However, it would be nice if they allowed 3 downloads, or something like that, in case of a drive failure, or some other mishap.

» Posted by: Kibbee at November 27, 2003 08:51 PM