C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 13 May 2006 18:26:57 -0400 (CLT)

I experimented last night, and had a hard time hearing differences between
different music formats.  I am also rapidly filling my laptop's disk (or
rather, that portion of it that I set aside for "personal" use, since it
is really work's machine).

Talking to a friend recently, he said that his ripped CDs were all that
remained of his music collection since his house was broken into.

Ripping music from a CD takes more time that cross-converting from flac to
ogg.


Taking all those points together it seems that a suitable solution would:
- allow cumulative ripping of CDs into a structured (flac encoded) library
- automatically cross-convert to a (lossy) compressed format(s)
- back-up the library to a second disk
- allow arbitrary selection and synchonization to other machines

Personally, I've been using kAudioCreator for ripping.  That creates a
nice directory structure of FLAC files.  rsynch can be used to mirror that
to a second disk.  rsynch can also be used to update a second machine from
a separate "selected" tree.

That leaves creating and selecting a tree of compressed data.  Since this
is significantly smaller than the flac tree it might as well co-exists. 
So an obvious partial solution is a process that regularly compares the
flacc and ogg trees and generates any missing ogg files.

Selection remains.  It seems that a third tree could be constructed, in
parallel to the ogg tree, using directories and links.  Building a
selection would involve deleting or creating the appropriate links.  This
would require a second app (perhaps a set of apps) that build this
cross-linked structure.

Andrew