I started developing this program about one year ago. At this time there was no ``real'' MP3 manager out there, which met my requirements. I am not sure, but I think that there is still no programm under Linux (beside MP3DB) which fits for me.
My demands on the program were to get an easy possibility to put the information about titles and artists into a database, without typing them in. Furthermore I wanted to have a possibility to search for certain songs and to play them. I planed a function to generate playlists also.
All started with some HTML interface which stored the title information in plain old textfiles. But this was much to complicated and slow. So I started to use a ``real'' database. I choosed MySQL under Linux because I had no budget to buy anything for this hobby, so I am happy that there is a lot of free software out there. MP3DB is my contribute to the open source community and so I started to distribute it on the internet.
I use XMMS to play the MP3 files. But MP3DB can easily be adapted to other MP3 players.
I hope all users of this program will have much fun with MP3-Database and would be happy about any commentaries. I am always grateful for ideas about new functions or bug reports.
A little legal reference at the end: To offer MP3 files with copyright protected songs, for download from the internet is illegal. There is no court judgment whether you make yourself punishable, if you download protected songs form the internet. This subject is heavily discussed in the moment.
To create MP3 files from your legal acquired CDs for personal use is however permitted. For this task, namely the administration of the personal CD collection in the form of MP3s, I wrote this program.
Graphical user interface. Easy to use.
MP3-Database extracts the ID3 tag from each MP3 file found on a CD. When commiting the artist, albums and titles to the database, you can edit all information from the ID3 tags.
automatically read in the ID3 tags of a complete CD of MP3s
upload MP3 files to your Rio500 portable MP3 player
functions to search for title, CD or artist
display all titles, CDs or artists of a MP3-CD
display a list of all CDs
play a certain title (with XMMS)
generate playlists (also with titles from different CDs)
generate a playlist with the 20 most frequently played titles
generate a playlist with 15 random titles from the database
copys titles to your harddisk to play titles instantly without searching for the right CD. MP3DB takes care about this MP3 cache and knows if a title can be played from harddisk
show complete song information
modify song information saved in the database
modify artist information
modify album information
automatically mount CD-ROMs
eject CD-ROMs
Documentation
Better documentation of the code
User Documentation
Function to search for titles of a certain genre
Complex search function to search over more than one field
Function to show albums of a certain artist
Create icons for dialog windows
Function to change a database field for a group of titles (for example: changing the genre for an album)
If you should find a Bug please don't hesitate to contact me. I can only make things better If somebody tells me possible Bugs. Even my English is not perfect, so plese tell me, if there are spelling or grammar mistakes in this documentation or in the program itself.
Under certain circumstances the program chrashes. But I don't know the reason for that.
Tk prints some error messages. Most of them are concerning Tk::Balloon. But this is not a serious problem. MP3DB works anyway.
MP3DB has some problems when two albums have the same name. I will have to check this.
As this project is growing, I can always need some helping hands. If someone would like to be a Software Tester for Mp3-Database, please contact me. At this state of the project it is not possible for me to test all features to the last detail. So I hope to get Bug Reports from the Mp3-Database users.
Also Doc-Writers and Translators are very welcome. As I want to concentrate on the code of Mp3-Database, I do not want to spent to much time with documentation.