Older blog entries for edp (starting at number 3)

music archive TODO:

1. capture CD audio.

   [CDDA]Paranoia works great.

2. uniquely identify CD.

   AFAIK there is no way to fully automate this in general.

   existing schemes use number, length, type of tracks. obviously it is easy to "fool" such a system simply by releasing a CD with the same number, length and type of tracks as another CD. so there must be a way to resolve collisions.

   i wonder about matching the extracted audio data exactly. my vague understanding is that there is ambiguity in where the "real" audio data starts (even if the real audio data can be extracted bit-for-bit perfectly). i wonder whether one could get repeatable results by stripping leading frames which were totally silent?

   (also note of course that there exists music which does not come from commericial audio CD. so there must be other ways of identifying music.)

3. manage other "metadata".

   eg label, release, artist, track info, cover art, liner notes.

   this is by far the most difficult part.

   want to submit/sync/check (some subset of) this stuff to/with/against free music information services like freedb and MusicBrainz.

i've been using GNU software since 198x. first Emacs, then GCC et al.

today i joined the FSF as an Associate Member. finally!

submitted BCEL changes today. one minor doc fix was applied immediately. we'll see what happens with the other stuff.

(haven't yet brought up ideas on enhanced support for dealing with targeters, exception-handler regions, etc. i'll get to that...)

so far, my contributions to free software have been minimal:

• i've donated money to the Perl Foundation;
• i've paid money to RedHat;
• i've reported bugs in various things;
• i've helped debug emacs (many years ago);
• i've submitted patches for emacs (many years ago).

things i haven't done which i should:

• donate money to the FSF;
• submit StackMap enhancement to BCEL;
• suggest certain improvements to BCEL...