One of AudioMan's main raison d'etres is as a metadata management system for audio files. Well what's metadata? It's data about data. What? Yeah, users don't have a clue what that is ... and they shouldn't have to.

Metadata is information about a file and it's usually stored in the file itself. So you have a music file (data) and then some information about what's in the file (metadata), like the artist's name. If there's anything I've noticed in the last five years it's that most users are too lazy to care about metadata.

And why should they? All of the information they need to know is on the filename and directories, right? Well, kinda. For about a hundred mp3s this does alright. When your collection gets large you might want to group files in more specific ways. To do that you need accurate metadata.

AudioMan aims to completely automate the metadata problem. You give it a file and it will tag it for you. It might even move the file to another computer/hard drive/partition/directory for you. These are things users really don't care about as long as they can still see their whole collection in a nice interface.

What about the power users and control freaks? They can still hand edit their mp3s but they should also be able to tweak the automating part in interesting ways so that they don't have to hand edit. Giving the power guys that flexibility will give AudioMan some momentum.

But the main key will be to take the load off the user's back. All of the information that's needed to correctly tag a file is either

a) in the filename or directory names
b) in the metadata already
c) available on the Internet (see freedb.org) or
d) in the audio of the file (see MusicBrainz).

We just need to make the piece of software that brings all of those sources of information together to make an intelligent decision on its own. Sounds like fun, let's do it.