https://sourceforge.net/projects/maltorg/
Description: If your collection of MP3s, Pictures (BMP, JPG, PNG etc), or Movies (MPEG, AVI, etc) is spread over many CDs, the program will catalog, organize and create previews of items in your collection. No database server required
For Who:
If you have a huge collection of MP3, MPEG, pictures (BMP, JPG, etc), or even
games, then this organizer is for you.
The primary uses:
If you have your multimedia collection not on the hard-drive, but spread over
many CDs, and you want an easy way to remember what each of those CDs contain.
Goal:
The goal of this project is to create a simple, flexible, and accessible organizer
of various multimedia files. It will keep the information in XML format, which
means it will be accessible to everybody (no database server required).
Questions? Comments? Response, and constructive critisizm is always welcome:
My email is: Nikolay Aristov esperange@rock.com
It is open source hosted under sourceforge.net
Click here to read more and download Maltorg.
As we all know, multimedia collections are easily manageable when all of the files are on a local hard-drive. However because people have such huge collections of MP3s, Pictures and MPEGs it is much easier to not clutter hard-drive and keep them burned on a CD. CDs can be accessed any time for the necessary music, movies, pictureCDs etc. However, the organization (cataloging) of the CDs is a rather painful process. The current solutions for keeping the track of what MP3s or pictures are on which CDs is an adhoc process. One can create Excel file, or a sophisticated database using Access or mySQL. Neither of the above processes is standard and requires a lot of work.
After failing to find a nice simple tool that would automatically keep track of my collection, During my Winter Break at the end of 2003, I (Nikolay Aristov) started this project. Since I am curious, I decided to create it in C#, just to try it out. Since this is my first time using C# for programming and using .NET framework, I might do some silly, non standard stuff.
So the goal of this project is to create a simple, flexible, and accessible organizer of various multimedia files. It will keep the information in XML format, which means it will be accessible to everybody (no database server required).
Say a person has already a collection of burned CDs with MP3s, Pictures, Movies. They are in a stack and each CD is labeled somehow (like "Cool Rock Music" or "pix winter 03"). So the person launches the future "multimedia organizer". Inserts "Cool Rock Music" and tells the program to add a CD "Cool Rock Music" to the collection. The program would scan all of the multimedia files and add to XML database. It will add Artist, Title, length, bitrate, if it's a MP3, or size if it's a picture. In addition it will create a little preview (of song or picture). After that the person can just look at the previews or search by the Artist, or by other attributes, and the program will tell him on which CDs particular files are.
It is written in C# and it should have crossplatrorm capability. I just learned, however, that Microsoft didn't create a compiler for Unix/Linux/MacX (what a surprize). However there is a lot of work is being done in the open source Mono project. Therefore, after all major portions are done, I will learn Mono C# compiler and try to make my program compatible for other OS. C# has a nice build-in UNICODE support for internationalization, so no matter what language you name your files, program will process everything correctly. It will have previews of all (as many as possible) items in collection (this will be hard). Search feature (also with Unicode support). It will be user friendly, and as fast as possible.
I am always for new ideas, even when they overshadow my own. So if you have some cool thoughts in your head relavant to the Maltorg, please don't hesitate to contact me
One of the coolest things that I want to do is to create previews for all/most of the media files. The reason is that if user forgets the song, it is possible to just use Maltorg and listen to the preview of the song before actually 1. Pulling Out CD and 2. Inserting in the computer. Previews will be little files. For example I thought I can create 10 - 20 seconds preview for a song , a small thumbnail for images. For movie, a short 5 sec movie, or just movie's first frame (like in WinXP).
Here's the problem: Reading headers, cropping files of different formats.
| File Format | Header | Preview |
| MP3 | id3v1 done, id3v2 HELP | done (easy) |
| WMA | HELP | HELP |
| MPG, AVI | HELP | HELP |
| BMP, PNG | NA | Should be easy |
| GIF | NA | Is it even possible? |
If you guys know stuff about the formats, or know a good resource to learn please email me: Nikolay Aristov, esperange@rock.com