the purpose of my idea is to archive complete music albums. you can think of it like as a playable compressed audio cd image with some bonuses.
first) is the ripper, it begins by ripping the wavs from the cd and generates a play-list like file. then downloads the cd covers, song lyrics, band info, or anything that is deemed useful. lastly it compresses the wavs, images, info, play-list, and whatever else into one single archive. this could be done with either standard compressors like gz:bz2:rar or something new. the standard compressors dont stack up that well against something like ogg or mp3, but they are standard compressors and rhythmbox will already play music in a rar (maybe others too). the new compressor could be designed new or is modified from an already existing one to compress wav files as best as possible, hopefully with in the ogg/mp3 rang. it is also possible to archive vinyl too. have the ripper save the recorded file as one long wav. then have the play-list be set by song length. when wanting to play a song, the player skips ahead to the time in the file when that song starts. second) is either a stand alone player or a plugin for existing ones (like rhythmbox). this player (or plugin) will load the play-list and display the cd cover directly from the archive. it also will give the option to see the song lyrics, and what ever else. and of course, plays the music. ;) third) is what can be done with nautilus, the first idea is to have it burn an audio cd like how cd images (.iso) are burned now. second is to have nautilus display the cd cover stored in the archive as it's file icon. there have been a few questions about this already 1) whats the difference between a directory and an archive? the player would have to scan each file in every directory when building a song database. this can be time consuming, rhythmbox can take a good long while to build a database which has a lot of songs (multi 1,000's) from scratch. lets say each album has an average of 10 songs, lets say you have a cd collection of 100 to 1,000 albums. converting this to mp3/ogg will produce 1,000 to 10,000 files. the media player will have to scan each and every file when building the song database. for my idea, only the archive play-list would be scanned, which being only 100 to 1,000 file scans to build the database. thats a 9/10 savings of time. 2) what if the archive is corrupted, then you lose all the songs. we don't rip/encode DVD's in chapters, its all kept in one big file too. same thing here. 3) there are play-list for directories already, so whats the difference here? well yes there are, but they to my knowledge are not portable, such as a m3u. if you change the name of the directory or move it, the play-list file becomes broken. the play-list file in the archive is just a list of its contents, where the archive is located does not really matter to it. 4) why include the extra data in the archive, why not just have the player download them? if you share the archives between different user, each user would need to download the extra data themselves. having multiple copies of the same files is not a very efficient use of storage space or bandwidth. if you want to take the music to somewhere else, the extra data would be left behind. including the extra data in the archive just makes sense to me i guess. 5) its to big to share online. not every one wants to download the whole album. thats not the indented purpose, its to backup and archive music collections. where everything is kept in a nice and neat package. p.s. now thinking about it more, it is possible to do everything as gstreamer plugins. make the compressor, then do everything else as gst-plugins just sharing an idea :) Robert __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- garnome-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/garnome-list
