[gnomoradio-devel] iRATE/Gnomoradio/... shared catalog

[Sylvain ZIMMER]

Hi guys !

I have been working with the iRATE admin for a few weeks, and we thought a
lot about standardizing things, ...

That both iRATE and Gnomoradio work together would be really great. I'm
sure there will be even more apps in the future.

However, to make it possible we firstly have to share a common catalog
(the list of the available files).

So I set up quickly http://www.libredb.org/

Here's how it works (tentative !) :

 - LibreDB grabs XML metadata from websites such as magnatune.com, it
grabs RDF data of CC-licensed files too, and so on...
 - So we have an huge database of available free music (either CC-licensed
- magnatune.com -, or provided "as-is" - iuma.com, ... -).
 - LibreDB gives each track an ID, the same way ISBN numbers are given to
books.
 - LibreDB publishes its database in XML format, refreshed each day or so.
 - Third party apps like iRATE, Gnomoradio, ... can grab this XML file and
use it.

The best way to handle this for thiry party apps is probably to have two
categories of files in their databases : the ones that come from libredb,
and the others which are server-specific.


With this system, when a client rates a libredb track (from irate-client
or gnomoradio), the rating can be send to both irate and gnomoradio
servers.

LibreDB currently supports (like gnomoradio) multiple files for a same
track. It even supports multiple sources (http, bittorrent, whatever) for
a same file... Check it out, we have some testing XML files with data from
magnatune.

I really need feedback about this whole thing. Nothing is yet finalized,
so feel free to comment everything you want, I'll appreciate your help !

I hope we'll end up all working together, to bring free music to everyone :)

Thanks

Sylvain