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Music Filesystems?

Posted by Cliff on from the endtroducing-the-MFS! dept.

Cutriss asks: "I suspect the odds are fairly good that a high percentage of Slashdot readers have a folder, disk partition, network share, or even a hard drive dedicated to storing Oggs or MP3s. Given that this is the case, wouldn't it be beneficial to develop a filesystem optimized for such a use? For instance, in Windows, Microsoft has special folder layouts for folders declared to have digital music or images in them. The digital music folders don't bother with file permissions or any unnecessary data, but instead display your songs with the appropriate ID3 tag information instead. If a filesystem were developed that intrinsically indexed its files by ID3 tags (or similar mechanisms), wouldn't this be an ideal structure for storing and searching through your album collection? And, more to the point, are there any such efforts under way to develop such a beast?"

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Metadata by SteveX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We don't need a special purpose filesystem for this; just one that supports metadata. I know NTFS does; do any of the common Linux filesystems?

    Either way you're going to need a custom tool to do searching and whatnot, the custom tool might as well just index the stuff in the ID3 tag and work with an existing filesystem.

    - Steve

  2. Please generalize that idea by lightspawn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Music filesystems? Image filesystems? Movie filesystems? Document filesystems?

    And please, please, at least store the file's mime type, don't play the extension guessing game.

    Web server: let's guess what the file's mime type is based on the extension, and send it.
    Browser: Let's guess what this file is, given the extension AND the mime type.
    Stupid computers!

  3. Use a database by janke · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Setting up a specialized filesystem for music storage seems both overkill in terms of implementation and maintenance issues, and underkill in terms of features. What would be more appropriate is a database table schema that stored music and lots of metadata (Artist info, title/album/recording/remix/venue info about a track, genre information, record label, user ratings/comments) about different recordings, storing the recordings themselves as either BLOBS of mp3s/oggs or (probably better) indexes into a normal filesystem containing the mp3s. Write a quick table browser to go through the collection, and construct a bunch of SQL queries to generate playlists by artist or genre.