~ryanlowe/blog: Removable Media

Removable Media

For the sake of this post, let's say that removable media refers to any storage device that is not permanently connected to your machine. If you have a better word for it I'm very open to suggestions. Here are some examples of removable media:

- CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R discs
- External hard drives (or Zip drive variants)
- Read-only discs, like music CDs
- network drives

At any given time your computer may or may not have access to the information contained on this media. But you'd still like to know you have it around, right? So AudioMan will help you keep track of it. I'll run through a scenario:

You put a CD-R disc in the drive. It contains 100 mp3s that you ripped from the original audio CDs. AudioMan crawls the whole CD and adds all of the songs to AudioMan. It also makes a playlist that you can select to see just that disc in the view. So the playlist tree might look like:

Whole Collection Playlists AC-DC Venga Boys Removable Media Rock Albums 1995

You take the disc out so the songs can't be played from the disc any more. Earlier, you copied 50 of the 100 mp3s on that CD to your hard drive. When you scanned the CD in, AudioMan matched up the files on the CD to the ones on your hard drive and consolidated them into one entry so you don't have duplicates in the view. With the CD-R you just added as the selected playlist, you can see which ones can be played off the hard drive instead.

You can also toggle between showing only available playable songs and all of the songs you have in your entire collection, including all of your removable media. If you need to know which disc of 30 your Led Zeppelin songs are on, you just browse in AudioMan to Led Zeppelin and show the info for the entry. It tells you they are on disc 12. A lot easier than searching through a stack of CD-Rs manually.

You could also put in a regular audio CD. It would download the track list from freedb and then match up those entries to mp3s you ripped to your hard drive three weeks ago.

Let's say you download a lot of singles from the iTunes Music Store or Napster. You are responsible for backing them up, and once you scan all of your burned discs, AudioMan would give you a list of mp3 files that haven't been burned to CD yet to make this easier. Then you can stay on top of backups.

What do you guys think of these ideas?

Posted at February 28, 2004 at 07:11 PM EST
Last updated February 28, 2004 at 07:11 PM EST

Comments

"...you just browse in AudioMan to Led Zeppelin and show the info for the entry. It tells you they are on disc 12."

How/Where do you plan on storing this info? XML Repository I'm assuming. As well, if you have 2 CD-ROM drives (E, and F), can you tell the difference between both? I do understand that a Data CD with mp3's on it can have a volume number, so I would assume that you are using that. As well, can a volume number (or name for that matter) be *not* unique? You might wanna check that.

Another note. If the CD (or removable media) is a RW, and you decide to rearrange the mp3's on the CDRW, will the changes in the directory structure of the CDRW affect the system which keeps notes of which tracks reside on the CD, and which have already been copied?

just some quick questions for ya ;-)

Overall, I like these features because these are tedious things that me and my friends who have large collections do manually.

Actually one of my friends simply dumps the file listing of the CD into a text file and stores all the text files on his hard drive. When he wants to find a file on this CD, he just greps his text files. The name of the text file is actually the CD number which he labeled and stored away.

» Posted by: roy at February 29, 2004 01:25 AM

Yep, the information will be stored in the XML Repository -- saved and loaded each time the user starts and stops AudioMan.

CD volume numbers do not have to be unique, that is a good point. However, a unique disc will have a unique batch of songs on it. If you just make copies of the same disc AudioMan won't care about them because the volume name and songs are exactly the same. I can use the songs themselves to determine if the user had entered that CD before if there is a volume name collision.

Yes, some removable media is erasable. Most of them actually, besides CD-R and audio CD. AudioMan will let you re-connect the media and refresh it.

As for two CD drives, AudioMan won't care. It just knows that the media is a CD-R. It will wait to see it again on either drive. The stored paths will be drive agnostic. Something like:

//VOLUME/music/Soundgarden - The Day I Tried To Live

I keep saying "AudioMan will...", though I mean this to mean: if the functionality is implemented, this is an idea about how I would do it. It's all speculation at this point. Using the application in alpha/beta will flesh out the details. Nothing is set in stone.

» Posted by: Ryan at February 29, 2004 04:35 AM