4 ms·

I think we are way past the stage of "files as an offline singular entity" thing. Most everything these days is meant to be synced, shared, collaborated on, cop

I think we are way past the stage of "files as an offline singular entity" thing. Most everything these days is meant to be synced, shared, collaborated on, copied, sent etc. We are in sort of a transition stage between files and "pure data" (or whatever you wanna call it). In these days of interconnectivity something like modifying metadata or storing metadata inside a file is a deprecated concept. This is a good thing but it takes away the simplicity of files. I have worked with MP3 files (built 2 audio players for Windows) and while it's fun, its very cumbersome as well. For example the metadata is not consistent across files. Not to mention how slow IO is. Furthermore it's not synced with the file. If another program changes a file, everything else stays behind. You can resync but that's slow. This is a sacrifice we made for owning the music we bought. Today you pay a couple of dollars for a Spotify subscription and get access to millions of albums. Is that a good thing? It's certainly an evolution. You don't have to copy files around anymore if you want to share a song. You can just send a link. You don't have to manage metadata, sync lyrics, deal with quality etc. anymore. That's all done for you. It's certainly convenient but it takes away the novel feeling of owning something.

echelon 4y ago
Metadata should have been a container format. MP3 or video files should have been left pure and untouched, with their original checksums. These media files should have then been wrapped in a standardized binary container that pointed to the inner file as well as a metadata payload. Changing metadata shouldn't change the inner file or its checksum, which would make many tasks easy: distinguishing amongst various recordings and transcodings, consolidating metadata, stripping metadata, updating album art, etc. The storing stars (ratings), tags, etc. could be easily accomplished in a portable way without sharing them to other users.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  I'm not quite sure in what way that would really be different from today. "Container files" aren't a native file system concept, so arbitrary software that doesn't specifically handle media files (like programs for backing up, file sycing, file sharing, …) still couldn't distinguish between changes to the metadata and changes to the actual media content. (Even something as ubiquitous as ZIP-files as a sort of unofficial generic container format is still mostly treated as an opaque blob by that kind of software.) And as for software that does specifically handle media files: What do you think things like MP4 or OGG are? Exactly, container file formats holding the raw media data. And even without a proper container format like in MP3s (the ID3 tag is just directly prepended/appended to the raw MPEG stream) it's not too difficult, and any music player already needs to be able to skip the tag data. So nobody's stopping you from writing a fingerprinting program that only looks at the audio streams within a file, and I'm sure something like that actually already exists.
lpcvoid 4y ago
>... modifying metadata or storing metadata inside a file is a deprecated concept. This is a good thing . Citation needed. I for one hate that everything nowadays wants to be a rent-extracting service. I will own my files, thank you very much.

echelon 4y ago

Metadata should have been a container format. MP3 or video files should have been left pure and untouched, with their original checksums. These media files should have then been wrapped in a standardized binary container that pointed to the inner file as well as a metadata payload. Changing metadata shouldn't change the inner file or its checksum, which would make many tasks easy: distinguishing amongst various recordings and transcodings, consolidating metadata, stripping metadata, updating album art, etc. The storing stars (ratings), tags, etc. could be easily accomplished in a portable way without sharing them to other users.

iggldiggl 4y ago
I'm not quite sure in what way that would really be different from today. "Container files" aren't a native file system concept, so arbitrary software that doesn't specifically handle media files (like programs for backing up, file sycing, file sharing, …) still couldn't distinguish between changes to the metadata and changes to the actual media content. (Even something as ubiquitous as ZIP-files as a sort of unofficial generic container format is still mostly treated as an opaque blob by that kind of software.) And as for software that does specifically handle media files: What do you think things like MP4 or OGG are? Exactly, container file formats holding the raw media data. And even without a proper container format like in MP3s (the ID3 tag is just directly prepended/appended to the raw MPEG stream) it's not too difficult, and any music player already needs to be able to skip the tag data. So nobody's stopping you from writing a fingerprinting program that only looks at the audio streams within a file, and I'm sure something like that actually already exists.

lpcvoid 4y ago

>... modifying metadata or storing metadata inside a file is a deprecated concept. This is a good thing . Citation needed. I for one hate that everything nowadays wants to be a rent-extracting service. I will own my files, thank you very much.