I’m finally getting frustrated with the (FOSS) tools available for sorting a reasonable large digital music collection. Although I liked Amarok 1.x and think Songbird (it’s still in review in Fedora though, and now blocking on FE-Legal) is currently the best choice, these applications don’t offer me sufficient insight in my collection.

To briefly sum up the functionality I’m looking for and these applications to the best of my knowledge can’t do:

• Connect with external metadata sources, like Discogs (this is really a must for me) and MusicBrainz
• Store more metadata than the usual Artist, Album, Genre, Year. I want to be able to assign an album to multiple styles, for example: Ambient, Experimental, IDM. Just like they do on Discogs.
• Support Labels! I want to be able to browse my collection by record label. Didn’t anyone think of this yet?
• Have a two-stage import function. First, point to a directory that you’d like to import. Then present a screen that lists the artist / albums, make any corrections (or opt to import from external metadata sources) and then commit. My current database is a mess because of poorly tagged files.
• Be able to model an artist hierarchy. For example: “Aes Dana” and “Solar Fields” are in the group “H.U.V.A. Network”, when I click “Aes Dana”, I also want to see his work for “H.U.V.A. Network”, so the application should understand groups and artist aliases.

Furthermore, this application should be accessible from anywhere, so I think it should be completely web-based. I think Songbird comes with a built-in webbrowser, so perhaps this could integrate nicely. Other ideas for the future: make a FUSE module to provide a virtual file system to the music database.

I’ve already written a data model in Django’s models.py, now I just need a name for the project (assuming that it will ever make it beyond the “good idea” stage)!