Well, the other side of the coin is that if you have two copies of the
metadata, one in a MySQL database and the other in the file headers, then
you need some mechanism to keep them synchronized. Otherwise you become
the proverbial man with two watches who can never be sure what time it is.
A client of mine used to use AudioVault. I spent lots of hours examining
AV .wav files to see how the metadata was stored, and was surprised to
discover that each file stored its metadata twice: in an AV10 chunk, and
again in a CART chunk; Lord only knows why. I was left to guess which one
was supposed to be authoritative.
AudioVault struck me as a thinly disguised Pandora's box of chaos and
contradictions. There were layers on top of layers, each one seemingly
written by people who knew nothing about the others. Date and time formats
varied from file to file; I found one in which the durations of audio
files were stored as floating point numbers representing fractions of a
day.
And underlying it all, like Satan in the pit of Dante's Inferno, was
Windows, an operating system written for secretaries and accountants.
AVSAT would crash from time to time during Boston Celtics games when it
tried to record news headlines into a file that AVAIR had cued up to play
at the next break. The Celtics would call for the break, AVAIR would play
it, and then there'd be silence... Rivendell would have handled it all
seamlessly.
Rob
--
Я там, где ребята толковые,
Я там, где плакаты "Вперёд",
Где песни рабочие новые
Страна трудовая поёт.
On Tue, 6 Nov 2018, Richard Elen wrote:
IIRC, you can store a full complement of metadata in a WAV file and there is
a standard for it, it's just not commonly done. I must admit that the one
thing that has concerned me slightly is the fact that the ingested files are
completely unidentifiable - the idea of writing out and maintaining the
metadata in the ingested files in case of a need for database reconstruction
sounds like a neat idea on the face of it.
On Mon, 5 Nov 2018, Fred Gleason wrote:
...This was one of the fundamental design principles laid down
at
the very inception of the project: the audio store contains
*only* audio;
all other metadata goes in the SQL database.
What was the rationale behind this decision, incidentally? Given the amount
of thought that has gone into the project as a whole, I imagine there is a
very good reason for it.
-_R
On 06-Nov-18 16:50, Rob Landry wrote:
Of course, one consequence of this approach is that if you lose
the MySQL database, the audio files will be more or less
useless.
If each audio file had headers carrying copies of the metadata,
it would be possible to reconstruct the database fromt hem in
the event of a disaster.
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