Foobar Offline DB reader

2003-10-31 11:48:50

hello there,

i wonder if there is some plugin wich would allow the reading of an offline cdrom library.
like many people, i archive my compressed album on a rom media, and use some archiving software to get the cdrom where my offline album is burned.

some flaws in this system are the poor compatibily of this offline archive, and the fact to use an external software (wich seems kinda heavy moreover..)

so, using the txt output or html report, of such software, i wonder  if is this possible to get a foobar-compatible DB, and if foobar would allow a kind of "offline DB search" tool.
of course, the next part would be to add a "read and add new archives" scanning feature to this potential plugin.

maybe it is a little work to adapt some existing plugins to this fonction (foo_dbsearch ?)

Thank you for your answers,

Foobar Offline DB reader

Reply #1 – 2003-10-31 17:02:01

It might be possible to create an extension to foo_dbsearch, so it can search a cdrom library (like foo_copynpaste allows foo_dbsearch to search the clipboard), so there would be no need to change foo_dbsearch itself.

However, there might be a simpler solution, if you're set on using foobar2000 for this. For the following to work, there must be exactly on cdrom drive for every cd (unlikely ), or the pathnames of the tracks/albums must be pairwise distinct (which means two tracks on different cdroms may not have the same filename including the path relative to the cdroms root directory). You could then store all of them in foobar2000's database, and add a custom tag with the cdrom label to each of those tracks. This approach still requires a lot of manual work (either add all the tracks manually or write a plugin to import the information from your archiving software).

I'm not sure, if the above helps you in any way, though.

Foobar Offline DB reader

Reply #2 – 2003-10-31 19:13:16

maybe i should be more precise on the goals of such extention : imagine a search box, which search in a FBlike-DB (or the database.foo as you suggest) and just respond the query by printing the CDrom label where the file is stored

ok, so you suggest to add directly the tracks to the foobarDB admitting that there is no dupe in filenames. but several problems still remains i suppose :

- manual operation is excluded, to i'll have to insert a report of my currently mp3CDrom-DB on the database.foo but to do this i need to know the syntax/structure of the FB-DB... do you know if it is accessible (i opened it through a txt reader but it seems that the tracks are randomly written and some character remains unknown)
- instead of tagging the tracks themselves, is it possible to add the extra track information (Label and maybe other things) directly to the FB-DB ?
- the FB-DB may indeed become larger... and your awesome plugin less efficient 

Thanx for reading,

Foobar Offline DB reader

Reply #3 – 2003-10-31 21:07:30

If you stored this data in foobar's database, you could access it not only with foo_dbsearch, but also with extended search or albumlist. However, I strongly recommend against messing with database.foo directly. You would have to write a plugin that reads in whatever format your archiving software exports and stores that information in the database using the official API. You'd have to learn only a small part of the API for that.

Foobar Offline DB reader

Reply #4 – 2003-10-31 22:01:45

ok, thank you for this information