7Aug/092
AFT and MusicBrainz track identifiers
A heads-up: Amarok File Tracking can now use MusicBrainz track identifiers for its embedded IDs. This means people that have used Picard to tag their files but not amarok_afttagger can still get some embedded AFT goodness! It also enables an interesting "mode" because it essentially enables song tracking vs. actual file tracking (which you may or may not want, depending on your particular needs).
Full details are here.
August 8th, 2009 - 13:10
That wiki page mentions that some people may consider “song tracking” to be a feature, but I would go farther. It would be nice to see a music player that explicitly recognizes songs for which multiple formats exist in the library. For example, if your library contains the same song encoded as both MP3 and OGG Vorbis, Amarok should play the better quality one (higher bitrate?) when you play that song, but when you transfer that song to a portable music player, it should use the MP3 version for players that don’t support OGG, and vice versa, without any transcoding.
August 8th, 2009 - 15:41
Your request makes an assumption that everyone would always actually want that behavior. (It also assumes that we can know ahead of time what portable music players support what formats, which is not something that can be reliably determined from many/most non-iPod players.)
While it is easily possible that we could do the first part, there would have to be an unobtrusive and discoverable way to toggle the necessary options.