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List:       kde-multimedia
Subject:    New playlist plugin - please review
From:       Ismael Orenstein <ismore () ieg ! com ! br>
Date:       2002-06-27 19:49:16
[Download RAW message or body]

Hey there!

I'm attaching the lastest version of the new playlist plugin I'm coding. 
Please review it. To test, just untar the package in the 
kdemultimedia/noatun/modules dir, edit 
kdemultimedia/noatun/modules/Makefile.am, add a filterplaylist line to the 
SUBDIRS and add a kdemultimedia/noatun/modules/filterplaylist/Makefile line 
to the end of kdemultimedia/configure.in

Run "make -f Makefile.cvs && ./configure && cd noatun/modules/filterplaylist 
&& make install" that it all should be fine.

The plugin is called FilterPlaylist for lack of a better name (suggestions are 
welcomed), and it was designed to work with large number of music itens, 
allowing you to partition them in several ways.

First of all, it keeps a track of all your mp3 (of course it doesn't work only 
for mp3, but I'll call any media item mp3 for brevity) in a Dictionary that 
is saved between runs of the program. It means that you only have to query 
for the id3 information once, and it is stored in a file. There is also a 
auto add option, that allows it to scan a fixed directory for music, so that 
your dictionary is always up to date with all your music.

Then, you can create what I called selections (or filters, or playlist, I 
haven't decided the best name yet), that are partitions of your dictionary. 
For example, you can create a All selection that contains all your mp3. Or a 
"Pink Floyd" playlist with all the mp3 whose "author" property matches "pink 
floyd". Or a "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" playlist with only the mp3s 
whose "album" property match it. I usually rip all my cds to mp3, so this 
system was designed with that in mind. :)

These selections can be saved to a m3u file, which can then be read by any 
other multimedia application or a good CD burner software.

The plugin isn't as slow as it may seems at first. The whole Dictionary is 
stored in a QDict, which provides very fast lookup and insertion. The slowest 
part is switching between selections (you can have several at the same time), 
but I believe this can be further optimized. The memory requirement can also 
get quite big, as the whole Dictionary is kept in memory. This is almost 
screaming, though, for a SQL implementation. As soon as I get myself familiar 
with db programming I can try it (btw, anyone knows how is the status of KDE 
db interfaces?)

The plugin is currently far from being complete. The basic functionality is 
here, but there still are a lot of things to do. You should be able to merge, 
divide and edit selections in a lot of different ways, and a lot of the 
Noatun playlist interface isn't implemented yet (no shuffle play, for 
example). Besides, you can only sort the items by a primary key... no manual 
sorting or secondary keys by now.

But I'm working on it... any help is welcomed as well. I only have some 
questions... can I put it on CVS? Where should I put it, kdemultimedia or 
kdeaddons? Are we already in a feature freeze? If we are, it's ok to add it 
to CVS, as long as it doesn't get compiled by default?

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,

-- 
Ismael Orenstein (UIN 1293061)
ismore@ieg.com.br
http://ksnes9x.sourceforge.net
http://ggz.sourceforge.net
http://linuxgames.com/xrally
["filterplaylist.tar.gz" (application/x-tgz)]
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