OT?: rhythmbox playlists by tags in files instead of playlist files

[David Mandelberg]

One of the problems that I've seen with playlists before is that if you move
files in the playlist, the playlist "breaks". This seems obvious to many
techies, but apparently is not obvious to non-techies (yes, I've had people
asking me why their playlists broke because of this).

Instead of preventing people from moving files in their playlists (impossible),
I propose storing playlist data in a tag (e.g. Ogg or ID3v2) in the music itself.

For example:
<library path>/.../foobar - rocks.ogg:
 Artist: foobar
 Song: rocks
 Playlists: foobar, 5 stars, #$!\,, other\, 4
<library path>/../quuxbaz - 1999 - foo.mp3
 Artist: quuxbaz
 Song: foo
 Year: 1999
 Playlists: 5 stars, #$!\,, backslash (\\), quux, baz
~/.rhythmbox/playlist-cache/5 stars.m3u
 <library path>/.../foobar - rocks.ogg
 <library path>/../quuxbaz - 1999 - foo.mp3
 ...
~/.rhythmbox/playlist-cache/#$!,.m3u
 <library path>/.../foobar - rocks.ogg
 <library path>/../quuxbaz - 1999 - foo.mp3
 ...
~/.rhythmbox/playlist-cache/foobar.m3u
 <library path>/.../foobar - rocks.ogg
 ...

The files in ~/.rhythmbox/playlist-cache/ would be non-authoritative, and
updated whenever the media library is. If somebody moved "<library
path>/.../foobar - rocks.ogg" to "<library path>/.../foobar - really rocks.ogg"
and tried to play one of the playlists it is in, rhythmbox could say "file not
found, try update the media library" or something similar and provide a button
to do it. After a few minutes of hard disk noise, the playlists would be up to
date again with no annoying support call necessary.

If anybody is interested in having this feature (or especially coding it),
please let me know. I can program, but I've never done any gui stuff before, so
any help would be appreciated.

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David Mandelberg
mandelbergd at eth0.is-a-geek.org
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