Meyer S. Jacobs's dashboard

Meyer S. Jacobs marked one of Farrel's replies in Songbird as useful. Farrel replied to the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like.". Meyer S. Jacobs and 8 other people think it's one of the best replies.

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Meyer S. Jacobs marked one of Dustin Paluch's replies in Songbird as useful. Dustin Paluch replied to the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like.". Meyer S. Jacobs and 9 other people think it's one of the best replies.

Meyer S. Jacobs marked one of Farrel's replies in Songbird as useful. Farrel replied to the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like.". Meyer S. Jacobs and 6 other people think it's one of the best replies.

A comment on the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like." in Songbird:

Those are pretty darn awesome.

Do you have a vector version? – Meyer S. Jacobs, on December 30, 2008 06:24

Meyer S. Jacobs replied on December 20, 2008 22:27 to the idea "Audio conversion for device support" in Songbird:

Okay, I have looked through the Songbird API documentation a bit, and it looks like a plugin might be possible.

Here are some classes and functions which look important below:

• sbIDeviceCapabilities::getSupportedFormats


• sbIDeviceLibraryListener


• sbIDeviceLibrary


• sbILibraryImporter


• sbIDirectoryImportService

And here is how I see the plugin working:
Media import:
(When something is being added to the library by user)
> Check file against stored conversion tables
>> If the files should be converted, convert them using some external program (or the gstreamer core?), save the transcoded copies to our plugin's directory (or whatever the user specifies), and add the files to a separate songbird library (not the main one).

Syncing:
> Wait until a device is connected
> Have we seen this device before?
>> If no, See what formats are supported on device, and ask user what to do.
> Import stored library of converted files into main library
> Add converted files to device's media list
> Wait until sync is completed
> After a sync is completed, remove converted files from main library (don't delete separate stored library)

This is a fairly storage-intensive implementation, not like the one I described in my original post. I'm not sure why I ended up writing out the outline this way.

Meyer S. Jacobs marked one of Carlos K's replies in Songbird as useful. Carlos K replied to the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like.". Meyer S. Jacobs and 3 other people think it's one of the best replies.

Meyer S. Jacobs marked one of nicolaluna's replies in Songbird as useful. nicolaluna replied to the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like.".

A comment on the idea "Audio conversion for device support" in Songbird:

I would love your help if it ends up looking possible to implement using an add-on.

My three main programming languages are Python, PHP, and Javascript (all of which are fairly high-level).

I plan to learn C and Assembly in the near future, the first of which will be the more practical in this context, but I'm in school and may not have large amounts of free time available for coding. Also, sorry for the delayed response. – Meyer S. Jacobs, on December 02, 2008 03:28

A comment on the idea "Audio conversion for device support" in Songbird:

That makes sense. I can imagine how a nice user interface for this feature would work.

I wonder if I could write a plug-in to do this. I haven't ever tried writing one, but I can definitely check out the API and see if it would be possible. – Meyer S. Jacobs, on November 27, 2008 18:56

Meyer S. Jacobs started following the idea "This is what the Songbird official release icon should look like." in Songbird.

Meyer S. Jacobs shared an idea in Songbird on November 26, 2008 20:30:

Audio conversion for device support

Audio conversion within Songbird had been mentioned quite a few times, but I have not been able to find any suggestions about conversion to formats supported by a particular device just for syncing.

I would greatly enjoy the ability to keep the portions of my library which are stored in non iPod-compatible formats (specifically FLAC) in their respective formats, but still be granted the luxury of easy syncing with my iPod.

A solution to this problem would be for Songbird to automatically create iPod-compatible versions of songs for syncing, which would be deleted after syncing completes. iPod-compatible copies shouldn't need to be saved for any sort of speed advantage as Songbird should only need to replace the files on the iPod if they are changed on the hard drive (which means extra storage space isn't an issue).

Meyermagic shared an idea in Songbird on November 23, 2008 21:09:

Composer parsing

Something that annoys me to a fairly large extent is how the composer field in song metadata does not have some standard way of listing multiple composers. I would love to see Songbird able to parse all these lists of composers, even if nothing it does nothing more than uses "&", "/", ";", and (more dangerously) ",", then clips leading and trailing whitespace.

This feature would allow the composer field to be much more useful when a user chooses to include it in the filter pane.

The only problem I could see with a system like this would be how to handle the selection of multiple composers in the filter pane. Currently, with Composer A and Composer B selected, Songbird would list songs composed by Composer A OR Composer B, while some might expect to see only songs by Composer A AND Composer B.

I don't think anyone would expect songs by Composer A XOR Composer B.

Meyermagic shared an idea in Songbird on November 23, 2008 20:52:

Automatic metadata transliteration

A very interesting feature which would add to the Songbird experience would be automated transliteration of artist, song, album, and composer names.

Although actually changing the embedded or displayed information about a song might confuse a user, it would be very nice if searching "Yuki Kajiura", "Kajiura Yuki", or "梶浦由記" would each return the same results, though the system might not be feasible for Kanji or other alphabets with multiple possible readings for a single character. Despite this, I think a system for dealing with hiragana, katakana, and other alphabets with unambiguous pronunciation (Greek and Hebrew are unambiguous, I think...) would not be impossible to implement.