Audio tag-editing in GNOME Music

So I got a mail a few days back that read “Congratulations! Your proposal with GNOME has been accepted” for Google Summer of Code.

I would have leapt in joy were it not for a nasty cold. Nonetheless this is a huge opportunity for me to get to learn and experience real software development with great support from the GNOME devs. The past few months that I’ve spent on the channels and contributing (mostly to gnome-music) have taught me way more about software than I had learnt in the previous one and a half year that I’ve been coding. I did not understand what APIs were and I was not even aware of version control systems. But I’ll cover more of my failures some other day…

Back to the project. Its what you would guess. A feature to allow users to edit and add metadata to their music files. This is a much desired feature, in my opinion, as this not only lets the users organize their music collection better but also get rid of “Unknown” tags that may riddle one’s library. I wish I was able to add some images of how it would work, but we have yet to finalize on a design mockup for the GUI. I’ll make up for this during the developmental phase with my regular updates on how it goes.

The cool thing to know about this feature would be that it would allow for fetching metadata using acoustic fingerprints which has prevailed in closed source software but is gaining popularity fast in open source projects as well. This is a very neat algorithm for comparing music data for very accurate identifications. You can read more about it here.

The wiki page for my project contains a summary of how I expect it to go as well as the link to the enhancement bug for this feature. I’ll be adding more content on this over the next four months, so stay tuned!