blairmitchelmore.com

I've been thinking about, and complaining about, media libraries for a couple years. People I know are probably pretty sick of it by now, but my complaints never really change. Media doesn't change all that much and neither does the software that we use to organize it.

I don't have any lofty goals about replacing mp3 or avi or pdf or even txt. They're here to stay, but what I can do is provide a coherent, consistent, and extensive system by which it can all be organized. To begin, we need to actually be inclusive by default. As of now, the only thoroughly developed taxonomy has been developed for music. There are some systems which organize documents, and even fewer which deal with video files, and there are systems which deal as generically as possible with any and all media. There is a middle path between specialization and generalization that no program has yet to fill.

I have an idea. Originally, this idea was for a new music player, but as I expanded the basic idea I began to see how the interconnectedness of media necessitates a system which can handle said interconnections. Though, as much as the ultimate revision of this system requires universality, the first step is to conquer proper music organization.

The first thing we need to do is forget about the filesystem. Ever since I've had an appreciably sized media library I've organized it according within the filesystem so that there is an inherent structure even before a media library begins to categorize the data. It's useful but it locks you into the same limitations of e-mail folders; there is no single chain of categories by which all media can be organized. If a certain song appears in multiple albums but the content itself is identical, why should two unique copies of the song exist? Filesystems can support this, through symlinks and junctions to symbolically reference the same file from multiple locations in the filesystem, but it's not something which media libraries typically employ. That said, the filesystem is a part of the system and we can't ignore it. Apple decided to ignore the filesystem in the iPod by renaming all the music in your library to random hashes when moved over the your iPod. This is for obfuscation not for organization but the analogy applies. A good media library cannot mess with the filesystem... unless justified.

Once a reasonable solution to the filesystem problem has been resolved (I'm not saying I have one, just that you've got to get there to go anywhere), you can actually take advantage of it. If there is one song with two identical copies in your library, perhaps from different albums, the core music data should be the same for both. And if there are two versions of a song, shouldn't there be an association between the two? Once you've begun to consider associations between versions of songs, such as an album release and a version from a live album, you have to consider associations between the original song and covers. The chain of connections expands endlessly, with multiple artists, multiple genres, multiple albums, even multiple titles and changing band names. The edge cases are astounding both in their numbers and the ignorance they engender from virtually every existing system.

I'm still working this out in my head. It's jumbled and, at times, contradictory, but talking it out helps. When I have a coherent plan, the coding begins.

Hello and welcome. This site will slowly become my primary site. I've always been intrigued by drupal and its superiority to other content systems has been expounded upon by various people so I thought I'd take the plunge. At the moment, this site will primarily contain programming related posts as well as additional static pages related to my various interests. The two primary sections of static pages at the moment contain the greasemonkey scripts and javascript code snippets I've written recently.

As I become more comfortable with drupal I may move my personal blog over from wordpress. It may also be brought over here but I think that'd be a terrible waste of a domain, so my personal and professional endeavours will likely remain separate. I hope you enjoy what I've got to say about... whatever the hell I end up talking about here.