I started working on this almost a year ago when I was looking for the 'ultimate'
mp3 player, and realized after lots of searching that it simply didn't exist.
That still strikes me as odd because digital music has been around for a long time
now, napster came and went, as did various clones. But nobody really spent too
much time on trying to take the whole digital music thing to its final conclusion.
To me that means that artists have immediate access to their fanbase and the other
way around. That is why the media exchange has a friend-of-friend network built
in, unlike napster you can't 'search the network'. Instead you get the option to
merge two media exchange collections in a simple way. (hook two of them up to the
same lan if you feel like trying that feature). Another demand was that I should
be able to fit it in my car, and after some fiddling a very early prototype
was installed in my car somewhere last year (and it has been working flawlessly
ever since).
Then Freedb went under and I got side-tracked to create
daz.com,
which is now a respectable website in its own right. The media exchange uses daz.com
for its automated tagging and to help with the 'undoubling'. It also provides
the media exchange with the 'follow' option.
To make it open source was also a no-brainer, consider this a step in the right
direction, but by no means a finished product. My ideal Media Exchange platform
is something along the lines of the freecom media players, only then with a
network hookup and a bit beefier processor. That would require the software to
be completely re-written for a much lighter platform. As soon as this project is
'feature complete' (or as complete as it can be made in a relatively short time)
I'll start working on paring it down bit by bit. Anybody that is capable of coding
and wants to help out is welcome, the full source code is included on the CD, and
if you want your changes to be part of the next release then send them to me.
I choose Knoppix as the base for the OS portion because it has awesome hardware
detection, and will run on almost anything that is x86 and has a mouse attached.
Graphically there is still a lot of work, also the HTML is pretty low grade,
see the 'todo.txt' file in /home/mxchg on the CD for my worklist. Little by
little we'll take care of all that. I'm especially interested in knowing if
bands are going to 'get it', I've been corresponding a bit with some fairly
famous artists and I was surprised at the level of enthousiasm that I received
from them. But I think it will be a while before the next big hits will be
distributed legally through something like this. But, who knows ?
