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Change the way media is imported, stored and taken care of

What is the problem you are facing?

From my perspective the whole concept of importing, storing and handling media should be changed.

1st: Importing As far as I understand, there are two ways of making media playable in Funkwhale: Importing (meaning copying, which is pretty sic, BTW) and "linking". Importing is not what a user usually wants, as their data is and will be stored somewhere else (and Funkwhale is not a storage server or something). This is especially true when dealing with container setups. Having data redundant is good when talking about data availability and protection (backups), but not here.

2nd: "linking" What I'm talking about is what's noted in the docs as "in-place" importing. This method is much better. The drawback is, that it is static. Quote from https://docs.funkwhale.audio/importing-music.html:

"While in-place import is faster and less disk-space-hungry, it’s also more fragile: if, for some reason, you move or rename the source files, Funkwhale will not be able to serve those files anymore. Thus, be especially careful when you manipulate the source files."

Very true. Fragile sounds like... unreliable, troublesome, a pain. And we don't want such a thing, right?

3rd: rescanning / re-linking metadata As we just have seen, Funkwhale expects a static media library, and no library is static. Musicbrainz Picard is recommended for tagging, which I really appreciate, as I'm a long term user and contributor to Musicbrainz in general. What I've learned in all those years is that the metadata get changed all the time as new info is added, false sorted out or corrected. Some kind if rescanning is needed, as well as a cleanup. With cleanup I mean something that deletes obsolete data from Funkwhale's database and prevents the user from seeing double entries.

4th: UI vs. CMD The whole process should be ported into the UI as a part of library setup.

What are the possible drawbacks or issues with the requested changes?

  • this ticket might need to be broken into smaller junks
  • effort needed is high
  • might be a good idea to do conceptual and strategic work at first, as this is not a easy task

Context

Well, I'm new to Funkwhale and find this all very user unfriendly and unmodern. Should be straight forward and easy.