Re: On defining conventions and unification...

[footpad]

Interesting idea; it could work...if you can get a number of people to follow your conventions

Just a few thoughts from a dinosaur:

• In discussions regarding programming standards, naming comventions can be among the most flame-inducing topics (along with formatting and white-space issues). Put simply, people usually have a certain set of preferences and don't like changing them unless there's a really good reason. For example, I'm an old DOS hack and it bugs me to have too many files in a single directory. So, while I've organized my MP3's using a similar convention, I've done it using directories, e.g:
  Ween/Chocolate and Cheese/01 - Take Me Away.mp3.

  Mind you, I'm not saying that it's a better convention than yours; it's mine and it works for me. What I am saying that instead of dictating the naming standard, why not a) provide a default behavior (your's) and b) provide an interface for overriding that behavior.

  For example, File::Find calls a user supplied subroutine for dealing with files matching the search. Using the same idea, you can allow people that don't like your convention to tailor your module to their own preferences.

• Um, certain versions of Windows use case-sensitive file systems. And, since OS X is based on Unix (to some degree), I'm guessing that certain Mac's may use (or support) case sensitive file names. The point being that things change and it's dangerous to make blanket statements.

• You might think about how your UNC handles a) organization by genre, b) organization by other elements in the file name, e.g. alphabetically by album Title.

• Track Number is only relevant to the original album that the cut was ripped on. If the user is burning their own music CD's, that may or may not be a problem. Why not strip the track number out of the filename and create a separate track index as a text file? Or--again--provide a way for the user to do the same?

• What standards already exist? If none, what conventions are Real and M$ using with their players? Have you searched for other thoughts on the subject? There may already be discussions and/or prior work you can take advantage of.

Just ideas to ponder is all...

--f

[deprecated]

I guess a code sample would have really cleared up what I wanted to do. However, I think it would be very easy, given the hashful nature of perl to do something like this:

use UNC::MP3::FootpadConvert qw{ convertfromfootpad };

my $cfilename = convertfromfootpad( $file );

update: I forgot to address track numbers. Well, track numbers, yes, are only important if youre writing or reading tracks from a CD. however, if you dont have the CD (lets say you are in fact violating copyright laws and downloading mp3's without discs and keeping them) -- but you want to listen to it, it would be nice to have the tracks numbered. Take for example, Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon. Throughout the entire CD there is a background track. However, if I had all the files and they were named "Money", "Total Eclipse" and so on, they would have no consistency. So while a track number isnt imperative to normal mp3 usage, it is very important as people begin to "collect" mp3's. Similar to my $MP3::UNC::dl (debug level) variable, it would be easy to hack together a $MP3::UNC::ignore_track_no. However, I also think that people who have a large collection of miscellaneous mp3's (as I do too) are not going to be spending a lot of time organizing them. dig?

So that isnt so much of an issue. I'll post some code when I've got the OO stuff working happily.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.