say you have a collective living situation. common recreation areas and sound systems. squeezeboxes in each of them. people come in with their own collections of stuff. there is a fair amount of overlap because they have similar taste. each collection is very well groomed on its own. the collection drives are added to the common server / NAS. under normal circumstances, we want to search and browse across all collections. but many dupes occur. in individuals own spaces, they can run multilibrary or itunes or whatever they want across their own root directory on the NAS. (most people still choose to buy their own squeezeboxes or run a software client and run across the entire library, though, even in their own rooms.)
several things occur regularly: - seven+ hits for the same album search. no quick way to determine which one has been ripped at 64k mono vs flac. in the common spaces, where the sound system is of very high quality, the more information-dense version is universally desirable. - multiple hits for the same album search. multiple copies of the same quality. only one is useful. - multiple hits for the same album search. one copy is incomplete or incorrectly tagged. the most complete one is still desirable. - search by artist. have to scroll through 3-10 copies of the (apparently) same result per album name. - search by track name. have to scroll through 3-15 copies of the (apparently) same result per track name. [even in this case, by removing at the album level all but the most information dense version, we get where we want.. a single result from the best album choice] again, i'll certainly agree that the algorithm used for selection may change per individual taste, but as long as it assumes that the data has been externally normalized (which i agree is not slimserver's problem), it should do a reasonable job of making the presentation usable. the only other major selection criterion i can think of which might be more desirable for some people is "select album copy with more items". in my case, i've found that total byte count works in almost all cases for accomplishing that as a side-effect. -- chroma ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chroma's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=22010 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=74288 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
