161–169 of 169 posts
Users on the Sony community site are frequently looking for updates to the software. I'm curious which file organization solution, hierarchy or tags, would be easier to implement?
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make an enemies of ausjke list probably
nope, just ask why? you're what you think I guess, I have not made any lists in my whole life and surprised you immediately guessed that.
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This might be a good idea if clocks were reliable.
That used to be more of a problem in the past. Nowadays, it's very common for a computer to have its clock synchronized via either NTP or a cell phone network.
As I recently inherited a huge, well-tagged music collection (tens of terabytes of files) I am very interested in this. Is there something like it, also supporting .cue files and also storing the original filenames and structure? A mediaplayer agnostic way to access this treasure trove would be the best.
I highly highly highly highly recommend beets [0]. [0] http://beets.io/
You can pry HFS from my dead hands! seriously, graphs are hard, and the possibility to lose data is serious.
In a tag-based fs I'm sure I will find a way to "lost" files.
Hello everyone, thank you for all the comments. Seeing this on the HN front page caught me by surprise. In the past year I shared this article publicly (Reddit) and privately (with tech-savvy acquaintances) for comment, and the general sentiment I received was that these ideas were not ready to be read by a mass audience. The article is way too long and pulls in many disparate ideas; it explains both why traditional…
I think a big problem with metadata-aware “file systems” is that the metadata is lost once the file is exported out of the system. This is a problem with ID3 tags for instance. Another problem is where you make the compromise in the no-mans land between fully fledged data structure and file system. As soon as you start adding meaningful metadata to the file system, it quickly becomes apparent that you want the files…
This is my thought as well. I used to run BeOS as my main OS, and when I finally had to move away from it, all the BeFS metadata was left behind as well.
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Why can't you do the tagging with series of symlinks in one directory instead? It is essentially an index.
Symlinks are brittle when files are renamed and when files move from device to device. Also, symlinks don't solve any of the other problems I'm interested in, such as: Not being forced to make unique file names, being able to find files by hash, being able to find duplicate file content, being able to have tags about tags, and more.
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But it will create multiple hierarchies, as opposed to the single hierarchy to which you are constrained by a conventional filesystem.
Do you see that as a positive or a negative?
Say you're tagging hundreds of academic papers, so you have top-level tags math, physics, computer-science, graphics, machine-learning. Each of these has many subfields, and there is significant overlap between many of those. Perhaps more importantly, there is unpredictable future overlap, so it is generally impossible to define mutually exclusive categories (i.e. conventional directories [not counting links]) that are future-proof. I like to be able to define each hierarchy separately, then freely apply tags from any hierarchy to any item.
That's just one group of related hierarchies, and other categories of items (mutually exclusive categories DO exist, with care they can be suitable for very high-level organization) will have similar groups, which may or may not overlap with the top-level tags listed above.
I would love to see a GUI file browser designed with tags as a first-class concept. You might just call them "dynamic folders" - in any folder you can view a list of dynamic folders, generated by the tags in the current folder. This dynamic folder list could be adjusted from 1) only the top levels of the local tag hierarchy, down to N) all unique tags that are present in the current folder.
I wrote a paper about the same topic while in Uni about 15 years ago, and also developed a proof of concept 'filesystem' with an file explorer that uses tags. Too bad it isn't the standard in any OS yet.
Would you care to share the name or a link to your paper?