Re: Re: xPLMediaNet - How to deal with Various Artist Albums

["Malcolm Lansell" <mlansell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 10:25 AM
Subject: RE: [ukha_xpl] Re: xPLMediaNet - How to deal with Various Artist
Albums


>
> Hi Mal,
>
>> What's the practical difference between "unknown" and
"no
>> album"?  Are unknown items dropped from the database?
>
> With 'unknown' the album is regarded as actually having a title of
> unknown,
> so appears as such everywhere
>
> What I'm thinking with 'no album' is that the tags helper will return
a
> blank value, so we don't have album(s) called unknown?
>

I guess it comes down to aesthetics - does someone prefer the user
interface
to say

album:

or

album: unknown

I don't really have a preference either way.


>> Sounds reasonable.  I don't know how your modules
>> communicate, but if it's anything like xPL where all devices
>> receive all messages, it should be fairly straighforward to
>> snoop the play commands.
>
> The modules interact totally independtly of xpl (with the exception of
> interfaces, like web, which use xpl to control a device), they pass
> parameters around as either one of several shared structures or a
string
> array
>
> Since each client will have already grabbed (in theory) sufficient
info on
> the track it's playing, it just calls the new stats helper which
either
>
> A) finds the track hash in the data passed and simply adds it to stats
>
> B) builds the hash from other supplied info
(artist/album/track/filesize)
> and add's it
>
> Have decided to allow hashing of all stats, whether or not there is a
> match
> in the media database, as these stats could be used by other modules
at a
> later date. In theory all existing modules (media, playlist, queries,
> browser) should provide sufficient info to create a valid hash match
:-)
>

Keeping hashing independent of the database is a good idea - you can then
keep stats on non-database items such as tracks on removeable media (memory
sticks, CDs, DVDs) that won't have been scanned.

Mal



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