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Rockbox mail archiveSubject: RE: Symlinks on ArchosRE: Symlinks on Archos
From: <rockbox_at_diffenbach.org>
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 15:55:10 -0500 -----Original Message----- From: owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se [mailto:owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se]On Behalf Of roland Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 1:57 PM To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se Subject: Re: Symlinks on Archos Hi Sweth, what about a playlist ? or bookmark function ? why do you need symlinks on your juke ? regards Roland -------end original message------ I don't know what Mr. Chandramouli's answer is, but I can tell you mine: hierarchical organization doesn't scale well to large numbers of MP3s. This is especially apparent with classical music, but it's noticeable with any sort of music. When a hierarchical file system is used to organize MP3s (or anything else) each entity can have only a single parent entity, represented by the directory in which that entity is contained. I organize my non-classical music MP3s by Genre/Performer/Album/Tracks, where the slashes are directory separators. An example: I have a directory off root named "Folk", it has a directory (among others) named "Bob Dylan", which contains one directory for each Dylan album I own. Problem number one: while I consider Dylan to be a folk singer, some of his works can legitimately be classified as rock music. But a hierarchical directory cannot represent this, unless I'm willing to split my Dylan collection up. To more faithfully represent the various Dylan genres, I would pay the (unacceptable) cost of not being able to browse all the Dylan canon at once. This problem is more of an annoyance than a call to arms for non-classical music. For classical music, however, it becomes a serious impediment to understanding what one's collection of music contains. I organize my classical music according to the following directory scheme: Genre/SubGenre/Composer/Album (Artist)/Track, but this isn't really a fix. (SubGenre: era/epoch, e.g. Baroque, Romantic, etc.) Consider my copy of "Arthur Rubinstein Early Performances: The 1932 Recordings of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1 and the Chopin Piano Concerto No.1". Rubinstein is important enough a performer that I don't want to split him up between the Tchaikovsky and Chopin directories, and the performance is distinctive enough (i.e., recorded in 1932 with all the pops and hisses that implies) that I'll usually want to listen to it as a piece, not as its constituent parts. But by making this decision, if someone asks me to play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1, I won't be able to find it unless I remember it's in the Rubinstein directory. Browsing the Tchaikovsky directory won't turn it up for me. The problem gets worse: I'd like very much to list, in Opus order, all the opera of a particular composer I have. But I also want to keep the original albums somewhat intact. I can do one or the other: collapse all of Bach into an Opus list or make a subdirectory for each physical album/CD of Bach compositions. I've done both, in various places, and neither is fully acceptable. Of course it gets all the worse when an Album, like Rubinstein's, contains works by more than one composer. Of course, one answer is playlists. I could have an Opus playlist, rename the file using the playlist EXTINF line (Archos does not honor the EXTINF line, using the regrettable ID3v1 tag; does Rockbox?). I could also have a Rubinstein playlist. But under Archos, while I can /play/ a playlist, I can't /browse/ it. Nor can I make it hierarchical or recursive (e.g., a Folk play list that would have entries only for folk singers, which singers could be 'descended' into to display all that artist's folk recordings). Another answer would be symlinks: I could leave the Rubinstein where it is, and symlink to the Tchaikovsky and Chopin tracks from the Tchaikovsky and Chopin directories respectively. (Note that the Archos firmware displays a windows symlink "shortcut" as if it were an MP3, but fails to play it.) A third answer would be to construct a database in place of (or more likely on top of) the hierarchical file system, to allow access to tracks via a multiple paths, a graph-like rather than the tree-like structure of the hierarchical file system. It's this third answer I'm currently working on; whether it will fit on an Archos is another question (but I don't rule it out). Should anyone have ideas of what facilities a database like this should provide, please feel free to let me know. Sorry not to be more brief, Tom -----Original Message----- From: owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se [mailto:owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se]On Behalf Of roland Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 1:57 PM To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se Subject: Re: Symlinks on Archos Hi Sweth, what about a playlist ? or bookmark function ? why do you need symlinks on your juke ? regards Roland ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sweth Chandramouli" <rockbox_at_astaroth.sweth.net> To: "Rockbox" <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se> Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 7:07 PM Subject: Symlinks on Archos > I suppose it would be foolish to hope that the Archos could > support NTFS and NTFS junctions (the Windows equivalent of symlinks); > is there any other way to get a symlink on the Archos that anyone is > aware of? > > -- Sweth. > > -- > Sweth Chandramouli Idiopathic Systems Consulting > svc_at_idiopathic.net http://www.idiopathic.net/ > Received on 2003-01-26 Page template was last modified "Tue Sep 7 00:00:02 2021" The Rockbox Crew -- Privacy Policy |