Thread: Proposed Web Service: Online Playlist Management

Creation of playlists online would be very hard to do. First, we would need to know the songs on both the desktop/client at all times. The amount of BW required for this would be immense and very costly.

Using the proximity service, we could instead just sync folders. The user could then create the playlists locally on the system and then when the sync happens, the playlists get downloaded to the client.

What are your ideas on this?

Sending up a list of songs shouldn't be too expensive in BW. But I guess that depends on the data we send up. Are we sending up title, artist, and album? or just title? my guess is that at most 10,000 is still going to be less than 1 MiB of data.

For all data services i'm figuring on an average 3G connection or ~50KB/s but in many places its more like ~10KB/s, which can make each MB significant.

Online playlist was probably the wrong choice of words...I was thinking more along the lines of uploading playlists and having them sync that way. If we use relative paths with everything it should work pretty well.

<plants discreetly hidden listening device beneath floral display in middle of the room>

You aren't talking about the services that match your "album" to likely matches (for those like me that put backups on their PC)? Not that I've tried it on an individual song basis - but that wouldn't be how they are set up.

(No - I didn't think so. It was too obvious.)

What do you plan on doing with these playlists once they are in the webservice? Without songs and song data to accompany them, they are pretty useless. And as you realized, uploading info about every song is costly in bandwidth and time.

We could use the title and artists fields of the smil playlist format and a web based metadata service to allow adding and remove songs to/from playlists which would then be matched to a users local files when synced.

But actually I was just talking about a sync service for playlists. We already have one for music and such (which I think the goal was to do locally if possible). I know a few users like setting up playlists on their home PC's since their easier to manage and then transferring them to the car. This service would do it automatically and translate the relative paths.

Originally Posted by Nextabyte_Matt

What do you plan on doing with these playlists once they are in the webservice? Without songs and song data to accompany them, they are pretty useless. And as you realized, uploading info about every song is costly in bandwidth and time.

Actually doesn't this sound like the way to go? If you make the assumption that you are using this web service for YOUR vehicle, then you have your songs locally, then upload your playlist data to the cloud. Now you can work with your playlist at home, at work, wherever, and as long as those songs exist at the location when you try to use that playlist it can play them. Even if you are in someone else's car you signin and use your playlist, and it is smart enough to play what it can, and skip what isn't there.

Storing MP3's online seems to be the wrong direction?

No one was talking about storing mp3s online...that was just a miscommunication. What your talking about is far more complicated then it seems due to the possibility of duplicate songs or name scheme differences. It would also not be useful to "edit" a playlist without the songs that its referencing hence my edit before upload approach.