[mp3togo] Fwd: mp3togo random comments

[sim]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Arndt <chris.arndt at web.de>
Date: May 15, 2006 3:57 PM
Subject: mp3togo random comments
To: reallifesim at gmail.com


Hi Simeon,

I just downloaded mp3togo 0.3.0 and tested it.

This is a very helpful program!

I wrote a similar python script for my mp3 player, that only plays MP3s
and WAVs, but I never got around to smoothen out the rough edges and it
lacked some important features, like re-adding tag information when
re-encoding. I think, I can dump this now in favour of mp3togo ;-)

One helpful feature it has though, is to save encoded files in a cache
directory and look up files to be re-encoded there first and just copy
them if available, instead of re-encoding. With this cache, the time to
fill the mp3 player should grow less and less as your favourite files
are already in the cache. I first thought, that this is what the -w
option is for, but apparently it is just a temporary storage for the WAV
files, right?

Also, when you encode the same list of files again and they are already
present in the destination directory, mp3togo will re-encode them again,
thus wasting time to produce exactly the same files. mp3togo could look
at the files and determine the sample rate and bitrate and only
re-encode them, when they don't match the current options .

Below are some more random remarks about things I stumbled over while
testing. Don't be put off by the length of these. mp3togo is already
very useful to me as it is now!

Thanks for sharing!

Chris

Replace line

          data_files = [('/usr/bin', ['bin/mp3togo'])],

in setup.py with

          scripts = ['bin/mp3togo'],

This allows the installation process to install the mp3togo script
wherever 'prefix' points to and get executable permissions.

It also allows to use

    python setup.py install --home=~

so that mp3togo will be installed into $HOME/bin and the modules in
$HOME/lib

Catch the ImportError exception when ID3.py is not installed and give a
helpful message, or even better, issue a warning and disable
reading/writing of tags.

Same for ogg.vorbis.

The debian package would not install on my Ubuntu Breezy because of
version conflicts. I know next to nothing about the internals of .deb
packages, but maybe this could be worked around with some more generic
dependencies (i.e. requires python instead of python>=2.4)

How are you supposed to run the tests? I tried "cd test; ./all_tests.py"
but got a few errors because
"/home/chris/tmp/build/test_data/test_playlist.m3u" could not be found.
Apparently it picks up the library from the build directory and then
fails to find "conf.py" too, because its path is hard-wired to
"../mp3togo/conf.py".

Can you suppress the substitution of spaces with underscores in
filenames? (My mp3 player only shows ID3 tags while playing, so I like
to have files named like "Artist - Title (Album).mp3" so that I can
identify them easily.). Maybe provide an option for an output filename
format string? I.e. in format string "%a - %t (%A)" %a would be replaced
by the artist, %t by the title and so on.

Why do you have to specify playlists with an option? Why not as
positional parameters, recognized by file name extension?

Would be great if mp3togo could get the playlist from amarok as well
("dcop amarok playlist saveM3u current.m3u 0"). Though this could be
easily retrieved with a separate script and saved as a temporary
playlist file.


-- 
sim