by wrwetzel » Thu Nov 19, 2009 5:22 pm
Gladius,
I have had the same thought for ages. There are many ebook readers available but none of them come close to the organization, classification, search, etc., capabilities of MediaMonkey. I have encouraged a couple of the ebook reader developers to have a look at MM in the hopes that they could include some of the MM features. But that's going in the wrong direction. MM already has all of the MM features. I suspect it would be a lot easier to add ebook support to MM than the other way around.
Should any of the MM developers be reading this let me put a little meat on the thought...
The obvious way to do this is to accept a new file type - .pdf, .chm, .djvu, etc. - that is displayed in MM along with the current audio file types. Much of the ebook metadata (title, author, publisher, etc.) could probably be forced into the existing audio metadata structure. Perhaps a few new columns in the display would be needed for uniquely ebook data. When an ebook is selected it could be displayed with a built-in reader or a reader of the users choice could be launched.
I would be very happy to see the above in MM. However, I would be a lot happier if I could ALSO associated a ebook file (.pdf, .djvu, .jpg, etc.) with an audio file much the same as album art is currently associated. That is, the ebook file should be in the same row as the associated audio file, not in a separate row in the database table. Why? Because I have a lot of music fake books and sheet music already in electronic form that I would manage and perform with MM. In this case the fake book file is just another form of expression of the same song currently expressed by the audio file. All of the metadata - title, composer, album (partially) - still apply. All of the sorting and selection facilities in MM could then be used to find sheet music as well as audio. This has the added benefit that the audio file may be available for playing while performing the sheet music.
There is one complication that makes this a little more difficult than just adding a "sheet music" (or some such thing) column to the MM database. For a given song the sheet music may be in one file with one or more pages or several files of one page each. This situation needs to be supported and there needs to be a quick way to advance from page to page as the music is performed, i.e. to turn the page. And MM should support a sheet music repository separate from the album folders in a folder hierarchy specified by the user.
Could this be done with scripts?
Thanks,
Bill
Gladius,
I have had the same thought for ages. There are many ebook readers available but none of them come close to the organization, classification, search, etc., capabilities of MediaMonkey. I have encouraged a couple of the ebook reader developers to have a look at MM in the hopes that they could include some of the MM features. But that's going in the wrong direction. MM already has all of the MM features. I suspect it would be a lot easier to add ebook support to MM than the other way around.
Should any of the MM developers be reading this let me put a little meat on the thought...
The obvious way to do this is to accept a new file type - .pdf, .chm, .djvu, etc. - that is displayed in MM along with the current audio file types. Much of the ebook metadata (title, author, publisher, etc.) could probably be forced into the existing audio metadata structure. Perhaps a few new columns in the display would be needed for uniquely ebook data. When an ebook is selected it could be displayed with a built-in reader or a reader of the users choice could be launched.
I would be very happy to see the above in MM. However, I would be a lot happier if I could ALSO associated a ebook file (.pdf, .djvu, .jpg, etc.) with an audio file much the same as album art is currently associated. That is, the ebook file should be in the same row as the associated audio file, not in a separate row in the database table. Why? Because I have a lot of music fake books and sheet music already in electronic form that I would manage and perform with MM. In this case the fake book file is just another form of expression of the same song currently expressed by the audio file. All of the metadata - title, composer, album (partially) - still apply. All of the sorting and selection facilities in MM could then be used to find sheet music as well as audio. This has the added benefit that the audio file may be available for playing while performing the sheet music.
There is one complication that makes this a little more difficult than just adding a "sheet music" (or some such thing) column to the MM database. For a given song the sheet music may be in one file with one or more pages or several files of one page each. This situation needs to be supported and there needs to be a quick way to advance from page to page as the music is performed, i.e. to turn the page. And MM should support a sheet music repository separate from the album folders in a folder hierarchy specified by the user.
Could this be done with scripts?
Thanks,
Bill