~ryanlowe/blog: AudioMan in the Medium-Term

AudioMan in the Medium-Term

With the ability to add backup discs to your collection, AudioMan is beginning to differentiate itself from file browsers and music players. AudioMan is more about overall collection management and organization.

I want to know where everything is, I want to search it, I want to know if all of my music is backed up. As people start collecting more and more digital music, these are the problems they will run into.

Right now I'm stabilizing and improving code coverage on AudioMan for the next development release (0.5.1). However the nightly builds are pretty stable -- go try it out and tell me what you think!

For the future, here's a tentative medium-term plan for AudioMan, in order:

1. Search

I want iTunes-style find-as-you-type searching. The search will take place on whatever sources are selected -- the Whole Collection, just the local files On the Computer, some playlists and/or some backup discs.

If you want to know what disc you backed up a certain album on, searching will be a lot easier than browsing -- especially for large collections.

2. id3v2 Support

This has been the thorn in AudioMan's side for quite a while. I don't think I have much interest in implementing my own id3v2 Java library; it's a lot of work in itself.

I'm going to start evaluating 3rd-party Java libraries to do this job very soon. I want to get this in!

3. Using TRM to Uniquely Identify Audio

TRM is going to make AudioMan a really great application. TRM produces an identification number, which seems to be like a hash code. The TRM number is based on the actual audio in the track, so even if the metadata or the file size changes, two files can be found to contain the same audio just by comparing their TRM numbers.

Once you get TRM numbers for every song in your collection, including backup discs, it's quite trivial to determine which tracks are backed up, and which ones aren't. Then the user can get a list of these unbacked-up tracks and burn them to a CD for safe keeping.

It will also help you see if you have duplicates of the same files on your hard drive, so you can free up disc space. As well, you'll be able to make sure that files you take off your hard drives are already backed up, or they'll be lost forever.

4. Beyond...

The sky is the limit here, people -- what would you like to see in AudioMan?

Posted at July 19, 2004 at 05:23 AM EST
Last updated July 19, 2004 at 05:23 AM EST

Comments

This all would have been really nice 6 years ago. When I started my MP3 collection. Now, my mp3 collection is too big for me to bother going through all the files, and fix all the metadata, because 98% of the songs have wrong or incomplete metadata. It would be nice if there was an internet based TRM database, which you could query, in order to get the right metadata for songs you already have. Kind of like CDDB, but for individual tracks. This would be a great feature, and would really give people a boost when they start using an application such as this.

» Posted by: Kibbee at July 19, 2004 07:22 AM

After doing a little reading, it seems as though Musicbrainz has the metadata linked to the TRM signature so Kibbee has no excuse for avoiding the organization his files.

» Posted by: James at July 19, 2004 10:25 AM

James: this is how I saw TRM/Musicbrainz as well. We'll see how that works out in the real world with real files. :) It will definitely be nice if it works well.

Kibbie: I know, I've been wanting an organizer and collection manager for at least 4 years now. :) I have at least 40 CDs of backed up music and it's getting to be a pain.

As for the tagging, something that might help is a better file name/path parser. It will look at the whole file path and take it apart and use it for metadata. Some of the fields can be automatically assigned (artist name usually first, for example) but others need user intervention/help. But it would definitely be quicker than hand tagging. I'm brainstorming ideas for this file name parsing in my notes... but I'd defitely like some input soon (I'll blog it in the next few weeks).

Anything that will make tagging files easier I'm all ears to.

» Posted by: Ryan at July 19, 2004 03:16 PM

Yeah, I got all my music organized by artist, sometimes album, each with their own seperate directory. This seems to be enough organization for me.

And yeah, I still have an excuse, because MusicBrainz only runs on windows :(.

I know i could boot into windows, but that would take all the fun out of it.

» Posted by: Kibbee at July 20, 2004 08:11 AM