This page looks plain and unstyled because you're using a non-standard compliant browser. To see it in its best form, please upgrade to a browser that supports web standards. It's free and painless.

Paul's Time Sink

| Main | Albums |

virtual file systems for music

Paul Westbrook | 26 June, 2006 22:51

I have written a couple of pretty convoluted scripts to manage audio tracks across our computers (script 1, script 2).  This is not really how I would like to manage my music.

What I want to be able to do is store music on any one of our computers, and access it from every compuer.  Ideally the path to access a track would be the same on all computers.  When a track is added to on one computer, it would automatically be added to all of the others.

In some ways what I am looking for is a distributed file system like Coda.  This would allow music to reside on some server, but be accessible by a bunch of other server.  Coda also allows disconnected operation.  (But I don't think that this works well with large media files, as each disconnected computer would need to keep a cache of all of the content.)

AudioManage is a windows application that lets you do this as well.  It creates a virtual file system where you can drag your media files.  The files system then contains the meta information for the tracks, as well as the reference to the actual file themselves.  This allows you to create views into your music, that cross multiple file systems.  When you actually want to access the contents of the files, then Windows follows the file systems reference for the contents.
 (More)

Powered by LifeType
Design by Book of Styles