Hi all,
I have a very large music collection that I keep on a portable hard
drive (to plug in to car USB, carry with when I'm at my office, etc).
All but a few dozen files are part of an album, and not a single audio
file. This translates to an insane amount of files stored on my hard
drive. I am very strict about how I label and file my media (I loathe
unlabeled audio tracks), but even so it is very tedious at times to
navigate this file structure, and takes a long time to load in my car. I
have seen other file formats (specifically one proprietary audio book
format) that supported indexing, and think it would be a great feature
to add to FLAC. Example...
Instead of having:
\Dark Side of the Moon
01 - Speak to Me.FLAC
02 - Breathe.FLAC
03 - On the Run.FLAC
...
Like a CD, you would have:
Dark Side of the Moon.FLAC
-01 - Speak to Me
-02 - Breathe
-03 - On the Run
...
It seems to me that a .cue (or something similar) file could be appended
to the FLAC file, and the ID tags modified and merged to reflect the
indexes. Any newer program/hardware could take full advantage of the
indexes, and any older program/hardware would simply see the FLAC file.
I can see one major disadvantage. It would be more difficult to place a
full playlist in shuffle mode without the program/hardware creating a
master index detailing the contents of each file. However, many
computer-based media players already do this.
I'm not very (any) good (at all) at coding, or I would have a go at
creating this.
Just a thought...
Probably what you want is a media player software that turns your file structure into a database, you won't have to spend so much time dealing with the tedium aspects of navigating the structure that way... However, I believe you could create such a file with MKV which can hold multiple tracks of flac AFAIK. I'd be curious to hear back if you try that specifically. Probably no normal music player will deal with mkv, but if your this into it you could develop your own.. ( if you wanted to look into a custom media player for option number one, take a look at xmms2 ) -David On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 5:53 PM, George Barton <crashputer at gmail.com> wrote:> Hi all, > ? ?I have a very large music collection that I keep on a portable hard > drive (to plug in to car USB, carry with when I'm at my office, etc). > All but a few dozen files are part of an album, and not a single audio > file. This translates to an insane amount of files stored on my hard > drive. I am very strict about how I label and file my media (I loathe > unlabeled audio tracks), but even so it is very tedious at times to > navigate this file structure, and takes a long time to load in my car. I > have seen other file formats (specifically one proprietary audio book > format) that supported indexing, and think it would be a great feature > to add to FLAC. Example... > > Instead of having: > ? ? \Dark Side of the Moon > ? ? ? ? 01 - Speak to Me.FLAC > ? ? ? ? 02 - Breathe.FLAC > ? ? ? ? 03 - On the Run.FLAC > ? ? ? ? ... > > Like a CD, you would have: > ? ? Dark Side of the Moon.FLAC > ? ? ? ? -01 - Speak to Me > ? ? ? ? -02 - Breathe > ? ? ? ? -03 - On the Run > ? ? ? ? ... > > It seems to me that a .cue (or something similar) file could be appended > to the FLAC file, and the ID tags modified and merged to reflect the > indexes. Any newer program/hardware could take full advantage of the > indexes, and any older program/hardware would simply see the FLAC file. > > I can see one major disadvantage. It would be more difficult to place a > full playlist in shuffle mode without the program/hardware creating a > master index detailing the contents of each file. However, many > computer-based media players already do this. > > I'm not very (any) good (at all) at coding, or I would have a go at > creating this. > > Just a thought... > _______________________________________________ > Flac-dev mailing list > Flac-dev at xiph.org > http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev >
.m3u and .pls playlist files are pretty common and most major media players support them, maybe even embedded ones like the one in your car. David's right, the best thing is to make a database of your stuff (iTunes was good, the last time I had a mac), but then that won't work in your car or anything. For a long time I've wanted to make a web-based music database that does the tables the right way, with foreign keys and lookup tables for artists and albums, instead of the naieve "giant excel spreadsheet" approach that everything else takes these days. For thirty bucks a month you could stream your stuff to your smartphone and rock out wherever there's a headphone jack. Actually, there is something like that out now (but I thought of it first!), it's called subsonic, and I haven't looked at it. If I ever stop being lazy and build my project, I'll send you an email. - BW On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 5:53 PM, George Barton <crashputer at gmail.com> wrote:> Hi all, > ? ?I have a very large music collection that I keep on a portable hard > drive (to plug in to car USB, carry with when I'm at my office, etc). > All but a few dozen files are part of an album, and not a single audio > file. This translates to an insane amount of files stored on my hard > drive. I am very strict about how I label and file my media (I loathe > unlabeled audio tracks), but even so it is very tedious at times to > navigate this file structure, and takes a long time to load in my car. I > have seen other file formats (specifically one proprietary audio book > format) that supported indexing, and think it would be a great feature > to add to FLAC. Example... > > Instead of having: > ? ? \Dark Side of the Moon > ? ? ? ? 01 - Speak to Me.FLAC > ? ? ? ? 02 - Breathe.FLAC > ? ? ? ? 03 - On the Run.FLAC > ? ? ? ? ... > > Like a CD, you would have: > ? ? Dark Side of the Moon.FLAC > ? ? ? ? -01 - Speak to Me > ? ? ? ? -02 - Breathe > ? ? ? ? -03 - On the Run > ? ? ? ? ... > > It seems to me that a .cue (or something similar) file could be appended > to the FLAC file, and the ID tags modified and merged to reflect the > indexes. Any newer program/hardware could take full advantage of the > indexes, and any older program/hardware would simply see the FLAC file. > > I can see one major disadvantage. It would be more difficult to place a > full playlist in shuffle mode without the program/hardware creating a > master index detailing the contents of each file. However, many > computer-based media players already do this. > > I'm not very (any) good (at all) at coding, or I would have a go at > creating this. > > Just a thought... > _______________________________________________ > Flac-dev mailing list > Flac-dev at xiph.org > http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/flac-dev >
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Brian Waters <brianmwaters at gmail.com> wrote:> .m3u and .pls playlist files are pretty common and most major media > players support them, maybe even embedded ones like the one in your > car. David's right, the best thing is to make a database of your stuff > (iTunes was good, the last time I had a mac), but then that won't work > in your car or anything. > > For a long time I've wanted to make a web-based music database that > does the tables the right way, with foreign keys and lookup tables for > artists and albums, instead of the naieve "giant excel spreadsheet" > approach that everything else takes these days. For thirty bucks a > month you could stream your stuff to your smartphone and rock out > wherever there's a headphone jack. Actually, there is something like > that out now (but I thought of it first!), it's called subsonic, and I > haven't looked at it. If I ever stop being lazy and build my project, > I'll send you an email.a squeeze client for your phone and squeezeserver (now slimserver) on the machine with all the music will do this already. not sure who/want has done a squeeze/slim implementation for iOS or android, but it can't be hard - the source code for a client is all out there.
Is this achieved by adding a cuesheet in the VORBIS_COMMENT block, using a CUESHEET key ? Some players can interpret this, as does foobar2000. That's what I used for my own collection. All FLAC files are exact copies of the original CD, properly indexed. I've written a couple of utilities to ease the process of creating the cuesheet. They're available here: http://www.mjuware.com, and free... Or did I misunderstand what you meant ? Cheers, Pyt. On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 23:53, George Barton - crashputer at gmail.com <+flac-dev+pyt+671ac35916.crashputer#gmail.com at spamgourmet.com> wrote:> Hi all, > I have a very large music collection that I keep on a portable hard > drive (to plug in to car USB, carry with when I'm at my office, etc). > All but a few dozen files are part of an album, and not a single audio > file. This translates to an insane amount of files stored on my hard > drive. I am very strict about how I label and file my media (I loathe > unlabeled audio tracks), but even so it is very tedious at times to > navigate this file structure, and takes a long time to load in my car. I > have seen other file formats (specifically one proprietary audio book > format) that supported indexing, and think it would be a great feature > to add to FLAC. Example... > > Instead of having: > \Dark Side of the Moon > 01 - Speak to Me.FLAC > 02 - Breathe.FLAC > 03 - On the Run.FLAC > ... > > Like a CD, you would have: > Dark Side of the Moon.FLAC > -01 - Speak to Me > -02 - Breathe > -03 - On the Run > ... > > >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/flac-dev/attachments/20110108/ee054131/attachment.htm
On Fri, 2011-01-07 at 18:11 -0500, Brian Waters wrote:> For a long time I've wanted to make a web-based music database that > does the tables the right way, with foreign keys and lookup tables for > artists and albums, instead of the naieve "giant excel spreadsheet" > approach that everything else takes these days.Amarok is fairly well down this route, with an (embedded) MySQL database for your music collection. I fell out with it for other reasons (it wouldn't build and was a resource hog), but that seems to be the way they are going. Richard