Re: [Ipodlinux-devel] iTunesDB import

[Jonathan C. R. <jon...@ba...>]

On Apr 6, 2004, at 3:04 PM, Jens Taprogge wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 02:11:16PM +0200, Terje Wiesener wrote:
>> Currently, I don't think there is.
>>
>> I am working on porting a library for reading the itunesDB to the 
>> ipod,
>> but it's going slowly... Don't know if anyone else is doing the same?
>
> I am planing on rewriting the gtkpod itunesDB code so that it does not
> depend on glib as soon as I find the time. Which might be in around two
> weeks.
>
> But you are od course welcom to beat me to it.
> The gtkpod code should be a very good basis. It is fairly well tested
> and supports most features (rating, playcount, volume adj. jsut to name
> a few) and under active development.
>

Hi Jens,

last time I looked, the gtkpod iTunesDB code was really slow... on my 
dual 2.4 GHz Xeon that is.  It took about five minutes to parse my 4500 
song db (perhaps the GUI code was slowing things down a bit too).  I 
shiver at the thought of running it on my iPod.  If we ever wanted to 
add playcount updating to podzilla, it would not be too wise either, as 
gtkpod actually re-writes the entire database upon export.  I think the 
way to go is actually a proper db driver implementation - updating 
records in place (or, at least, with a cache mechanism for updates, so 
as to minimise disk access).

I have started work on a playqueue in podzilla - for now I'm going to 
use my own simple d.b. files for browsing songs (to be generated with 
libid3tag on the host).  I am working on the principle of caching up to 
16 MB of the next songs in the playqueue, and actually playing them 
with libmad (rather than forking a sub-process).  (Intel's code is my 
second candidate, but its not GPLed).

When I've gotten that working, I would port the code to the binary 
iTunesDB format, and add play-count updating.
For the time-being, I think Bernards idea of a link farm is the 
quickest way we'll get user-friendly song browsing in podzilla :-).

Cheers,
	Jonathan.