[PATCH] Optical disc tracks

[Owen Fraser-Green]

Hi,

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 20:22, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sorry for the lag.

No problem. Hope you're enjoying your trip (in spite of the rambling
mails you're getting from me all the time :).

> On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 11:13:09PM +0200, Owen Fraser-Green wrote:
> > Attached is a patch to detect CD/DVD tracks and add them as devices
> > underneath the disc device. This seemed like a logical step given that a
> > disk devices have their volumes as children.
> > 
> > It's useful since it provides track position (useful for calculating
> > CDDB/Musicbrainz IDs and the like) and track length (useful for CD
> > players).
> > 
> > What I felt a little shaky on though was what to give for
> > info.capabilities (currently "track"), info.category (currently "track")
> > and info.product (currently "Track", well, OK that one seems obvious
> > enough at least).
> > 
> 
> To be totally honest, I'm not sure whether this patch is useful or
> whether it would be considered bloat. 

Ok, the goal posts are placed a little differently from my perception of
them when I wrote that patch. I do still think though that a track is to
a CD as a partition is to a hard disk and, therefore, is just as
deserving of inclusion in the HAL device tree (even if UNIX happens to
not regard them as devices worthy of /dev nodes). Where my opinion has
been changed though is with respect to the extra properties I was
throwing in there such as the track length. The track number, address
and format are the fundamental ones which are actually held on the CD
and from which the others can be derived.

Oh, and seeing as I'm in a bit of a use-casey mood tonight :) ...

I have a number of mixed-mode CD's - mostly ones where there's a bunch
of audio tracks (which is what I bought the CD for) and a data track
with a WMV-9 encoded video (which I really didn't want). Now, every time
I pop one of these CD's into my drive, up comes a dialogue box informing
me that the CD has both audio tracks and data and asks would I like to
Browse or Play (or Cancel - the default choice, for some reason). Every
time, I hit Play except on a couple of CD's I got from magazine covers
which carry some silly song along with the data I actually wanted. Dear
Santa, I wish for GNOME to offer to "Remember my choice for this CD". To
do so, though, it would need to get a signature for the CD and to get
that it needs to know stuff about the tracks (just like identifying
similar ethernet devices by their MAC addresses)

Cheers,
Owen



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