The Story So Far

In looking over the last post it becomes clear that one of the problems with this kind of set up is labor.  One or two files at a time? Sure. But 50 Gb?  Never happen.

This is where we need to leverage other data sources. Anyone who spent any time converting their CD collection to MP3s back in the good old days remembers CDDB.  CDDB was a collaboratively built database collecting together information about a CD. The tracks, copyright information, publisher, etc. This made the effort of moving your CD collection onto a Diamond Rio a lot less of a hassle. Instead of having to enter in all the data, you picked from a few best matches and maybe touched up a little of the data that was provided.  Once in a while you’d find that no one had entered in your Darkest of the Hillside Thickets cds, and you’d have to do the work and push it up to the database.

This can be further enhanced if screen scrapers are available to examine the contents of the vending store page and pull out the details the publisher provides. An example of this is my Calibre plugin, http://www.rpgnow.com/product/99421/One-Bookshelf-for-Calibre.

So you say. So what do we do about it?

It’s pretty clear to me that any collection tool is going to need a plugin framework in order to more easily and rapidly expand to support other, well, things. Whether that is adding a new file format ( Digital Paper returns from the grave! ) or adding additional retailers to scrape metadata from, it’s the most flexible way to handle that growth and decouple it from the main stability of the collection maintainer.

With that in mind, I’ve started a preliminary project. It needs a better name than the haphazard RCCDB it is currently labelled. As a baseline, I’m going to use the previously referenced labels along with additional facts about the file ( filesize, md5, production dates per the PDF if present, etc ) which will be used to recognize different versions of the books we’ll be sorting.

That is all well and good but…

Yes, I know. It needs a client. Preliminary work is going on there as well. I expect I will very likely also build a Calibre plugin. Yeah, that needs a name too.