From: William Pietri <william_at_pota.to>
Date: 27 Apr 2003 09:08:19 -0700

On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 02:19, Mike Holden wrote:
> >
> > It would seem that the right way around the slowness of finding tags
> > would be for Rockbox to build up its own cache of metadata, allowing the
> > interface to be less dependent upon file structure.
>
> If you want to do this, then the answer is to build this kind of stuff
> off-line, on a PC, not on-line in Rockbox. Building these kind of
> databases is time and resource hungry, so better done on a PC, where you
> have mains power, a fast disk and a fast processor.
>
> They are called "playlists", and Rockbox can play them if you have them!

If all I wanted to do with the interface was playlists, that would be
true. But I'm interested in building something more dynamic.

Regardless, I agree that building up the database on a PC is a great way
to go, and that's probably how I'd start. But I'd guess that for full
adoption, assuming that people will always use a special tool to keep
their metadata caches up to date isn't a good way to go. Archos's
it's-just-a-USB-disk approach is great, as you can manage the music with
pretty much anything. But I think that means that when coding, you have
to make that lowest common denominator work, even if you also go for
optimizations when better things are available.

Still, y'all are safe from my interface experiments for a while; it's
going to be at least a couple of months before I can clear enough time
to start hacking away on this. But Rockbox is so cool that I'll be very
excited to contribute when I get the chance.

William

-- 
William Pietri <william_at_pota.to>

Received on 2003-04-27