Music is my backrub

Hmm yes well it seems we’re embarking on a little adventure here. Sounds like a good plan to me, I need a kick in the pants to actually learn Cocoa and learn it well. I do like it, lots, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a lack of practice on my part. But I’m excited to fix that. Our ideas are still a little fuzzy right now, but here’s how I see a few things.

First of all, (and maybe this is just me being stubborn. It almost surely is) I don’t want to use SQL for my app. Since I’m on Mac OS X (Leopard, rawr), I have lots of yummy CoreThings. One such is CoreData (which I’m pretty sure is sql somewhere deep down but it’s hidden from me) which I will use for maintaining files and so on. And then I’ve got CoreAudio. Those are probably the two most important parts.

So instead of using mySql I’ll be using CoreData, and my idea is that instead of doing some sort of wangodango mirroring, there’s simply to be an interface. That is, my application will know all of my music, in some form of objects or whatnot, and it will know Cody’s too (this will all be represented the same, really). The song object will basically have all the metadata needed (title, artist, genre, etc) and also location of where it can be found on disk. If it’s local, no problem. If remote, well then I’ve got to fetch it however Cody and I decide to do it. I say the simpler the better, but that’s not important right now.

But Cody needs to know about my music too, so he can know what I’ve got and where to find it, so my idea is to have an interface that basically says “Hey you, I’ve added a new song->details” And then he will get that data and add implement it however he chooses. Same goes for when he adds a song, he sends me a message and I add it to my collection.

Now, once that is all settled there’s the matter of playing the files. I’ll come right out and say it: I like iTunes, I’m pretty happy with it and I don’t want to ditch it, so I won’t. I’m going to keep using iTunes to play all of my local music. But when it comes to playing remote music, I’ll use our little app (*new feature* If I’m listening to a remote file and I like it enough, have an option to copy it locally and add it to iTunes**) to play it. So basically, I look at music from Cody, and I say “hey I want that song” so I get it, transfer it over, and then play it right in my app. I can do this pretty easily because Mac OS X have Quicktime built in pretty deep. So it’s trivial to play just about any file (maybe not Ogg or FLAC, but who needs that? I don’t).

I think I’ll build up an interface here maybe tonight just to see what it may look like.

EDIT

Okay here’s the UI I’ve made, it’s basically got everything I need. I can select a different machine from the dropdown list and control that machine remotely.

What do you think?