AudioLink

Welcome to the home page of the AudioLink project.

Currently, it's called AudioLink, 'cos the first milestone would just handle audio files... subsequent versions will be capable of searching for content in HTMLs, PDFs, PSs and other file formats.

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Why should I use it?

This project started with my need of searching for files on my local machine, be it music or any stored information in .txt, .html, .pdf formats. The main goal of the software is to make searching for _content_ on local file systems (or remote file systems mounted in the local namespace) easier. This differs from other search tools, which look for files, not content. You can't use traditional tools like grep to search for songs or a particular artist, for example.

If you are in search of such a tool, AudioLink is for you!

The project will further be improved upon to include a LAN crawler, which will sniff on NFS, SMB, FTP, among other protocols, to collect information on the files residing on other machines as well.

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How does it work?

There are two steps involved in getting AudioLink to work:

Create a database of audio files: A MySQL database is created/updated in this stage. The song information is extracted from the ID3 tags of the file. If enough information doesn't exist in the ID3 tags, you could choose to enter the information yourself. Once done, you won't need to do this again till you add new files to your collection.
Search the database for particular songs: Provide search criteria and a directory name in which you want the links to the original song files to be made. Links are created in this directory and you can then add all these files in a playlist.

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How stable/usable is AudioLink?

AudioLink is currently stable and pretty usable. I use it daily on my desktop. Currently, it has only a command line interface (CLI), and creates symbolic links (symlinks) to the actual music files. Exporting to playlists in formats used by popular media players, supporting multiple GUIs and other options will be added soon.

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Where can I get more information?

Send any queries/feedback to audiolink-users@lists.sourceforge.n e t.

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How can I contribute?

There are many ways in which you can help in the development of this project. Some of them are:

If you find the tool lacking in any respect, tell the developers about it. You can mail audiolink-devel@lists.sourceforge.n e t or (better) file bug/wish reports on the sourceforge bug tracker. Even better would be if you can send patches to the devel list.
Contribute documentation to the project
Contribute a logo for the project
For general development-related todos, see the todo.txt files within each sub-directory for a list of items that need attention.
Take a look at the open bugs and contribute patches
Handle package management
Handle publicity, like doing sf.net news items, freshmeat announcements, etc

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Philosophy

Let's say I have a lot of songs sorted by the albums they feature in. Now, if I want to listen to songs sung by a particular artist, I'll have to remember each of the artist's albums, or rummage through the entire collection. Both of these options (and any others on similar lines) are not viable.

So, wouldn't it be nice if I could just give a search for the artist, and I get a "view" in which I can access all of the artist's songs? On traditional UNIX systems, a very simplistic version of this view would be creating a directory with the name of the artist, and creating symbolic links to all the songs of that artist in this new directory. In this way, you have all his songs in one place... add all of these files in a playlist... enjoy! :-)

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