Thread: Media and Database questions

Originally Posted by Extide

So, I understand you do want to include media tag information in the sqllite db, right? I would like the ability to do natural language queries (at least, doing more advanced queries where you specify each field would be nice too) against the db, and have it generate a playlist to play against, and have it be sort of dynamic. I sort of made an app that does this (but with SQLCE) and would really like for this to do something like that.

How far away are we from having this sort of basic functionality?

Were about 90% of the way there. Queries against single and multiple fields can already be done but not quite as diversely as natural language searching. Rewriting of the media database is actually the item i'm currently working on,the goal being to achieve simplicity and diversity (yea I know their usually opposites) without losing any performance. The final design is taking into account that many music collections far exceed 100,000 songs and users expect instant performance. I've done a lot of work with natural language processing as part of speech recognition but it adds overhead so that probably won't be the direction we go.

Originally Posted by Extide

Also, for media play capability, it seems you do not want to rely on a 3rd party app (which is also how I was designing my front end) and I am curious as to what libraries you are looking into using for audio capabilities? (The front end I was making was more of a proof of concept of a few ideas and isnt really suitable for use)

I'd like to support: (Roughly in this priority)
mp3
flac
ogg
wma

The official media plugin for windows is based off of directshow which provides support for all of those. The nice part about the modular design is that you can add support for whichever backend you prefer.

Originally Posted by Extide

Also, while talking about music, I would like to support some visualization plugins too. Let's start with Geiss. Either a wrapper to allow winamp plugs, or something more native would be fine. Any work being done in that area?

The one area I haven't included . Theres 3 options for visualizations, none of which i've considered until just now:
1) Visualizations are added as part of the AV player plugin and respond to the visualize and stop visualize commands
2) Visualizations are their own type of plugin
3) Visualizations fall into the other category (aka implement IOther) as an unofficial part of the framework

All of which would require very very minor changes to add support. My personal preference would be option 1 but that would slightly limit the diversity of standalone visualization engines.