Audio Catalogue Browser

[tim-janik]

Anklang needs a facility to index, browse and select audio files that can be used in samplers like LiquidSFZ, with fluidsynth or for audio tracks.

Here are some design considerations:

• We need an indexer that scans directories for sample files, ideally out of process, so scanning can operate in the background (reniced).
• We could use LMDB to store indexed files in ~/.cache/anklang/indexer.db, that takes care of robustness and we avoid needing another IPC layer.
• Locations of interest:
  • XDG_DATA_HOME: /anklang/samples /sounds
  • [CFG] $(prefix)/share/sounds $(prefix)/share/anklang/samples /usr/share/sounds /usr/local/share/sounds
  • [CFG] XDG_MUSIC_DIR, XDG_AUDIO_DIR[*], XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR
  • [CFG] XDG_DATA_DIRS + /sounds
  • XDG_SAMPLE_DIRS[*], XDG_AUDIO_DIRS[*]
  • $ANKLANG_SAMPLE_DIRS, $ANKLANG_AUDIO_DIRS
• Sample packs provided by Anklang should probably end up in $XDG_DATA_HOME/anklang/sounds or similar and be unconditionally scanned.
• The indexer might need to read anklangrc.json in order to honor user settings.
• The indexer should be started in the background when the Anklang GUI is running and possibly via AnklangEngine --crawl or so.
• Is there a clever way to avoid re-indexing all directory hierarchies upon restart? For Anklang packages we can make sure to trigger invalidation as needed, but for paths like/usr/share/sounds or ~/Music/ that are potentially huge, I wonder if it is good enough to to carry out rescans with only maxdepth=2 or so.
• In cases where the user knows that new content has been added deep in some ~/Music/ hierarchy, it makes sense to add a [Rescan] button.
• I have looked at some sample packages by other DAWs and /usr/share/sounds, there are a lot of tags or categories that can be extracted from just crawling file and directory names, without having to inspect file contents. One trick here is to cross match dir/filename strings against /usr/share/dict/words to yield meaningful tag and category names.
• Content scanning is a whole different can of worms that we might want to not open just yet.
• Just the dir + file name already yields file type, short name, in many cases genre, sometimes BPM. For a WAVE selection dialog with content filtering based on tags, that is good enough for a start.
• The current file browser could be extended with another pane (left side) to select tags from a list, and the current filename input field could become a search bar when in catalogue selection mode. The new pane could serve as bookmark list for ordinary file selection.
• We might even want to support users actively switching between file-sector and catalogue-browser mode (via notebook tabs?), depending on where they need to pick an audio snippet from.

[*]: Note that $XDG_AUDIO_DIR and related search paths are not in the official spec, but it would make sense to introduce this. With ~/Music for music to listen to, ~/Videos for movies to watch, it could make sense to have ~/Audio for sample files, and MIDI clips, multisample files, etc.
[CFG]: Some of these dirs could potentially span large hierarchies, it could make sense to allow users to configure automatic scanning of these via the preferences.

[tim-janik]

Cubase MediaBay Window

[tim-janik]

FL Studio Browser

[tim-janik]

Samplism Sample Management

[Reaper10]

you have icons for the all audio file formats?