[mythtv] Mythmusic Replacement

[Borg]

I have been reading all the mails about Mythmusic lately and am finally glad
to see some others who are also interested in bringing MythMusic into a
trully useable module.  Not knocking anyone at all, but the current version
does play music, but leaves a lot to be desired feature and performance
wise.  About a year ago I commented on kind of how I would like to see this
module develop out.  At the time Thor was working on the MFD stuff and I was
busy otherwise so I kind of took a wait and see attitude.

Well, not much has changed in that time.  I am really hoping I can devote
some time to this after the first of the year.  Maybe there is enough
interest from different parties to get this going and get it accomplished.

Just as a quick overview of how I see the design - comments welcome:
	1) 3 pieces, maybe 4 depending on how you look at it:
		A) Master backend server - main purposes:
			Delivers music to requestors either streaming or the entire files /
albums / playlists, etc.
			Delivers music lists to requestors - one level at a time.  No need to
deliver all 4000 available songs, when the person really just wants to play
a single album that they listen to regularly.
			Keeps track of stats - how many times played, etc.
			This guy is the only one that accesses the database, so it must handle
all database type requests (Save playlists, update playlists, retrieve song
/ music info).

		B) Player Daemon
			Plays music.  Requests next songs from Master Backend.  Accepts a
playlist from gui's.  This runs in background and thus can play music while
doing other things.  Can output to 2nd second card or multiple sound cards.
Can be controlled by any GUI on any machine.

		C) GUI's
			Multiple's of these, Windows, Linux, Myth plugin.  Pretty simple devices.
Provides controls for controlling the player Daemon (Play, stop, pause,
etc).  Navigate through music lists via communication with Master Backend
Server.

		D) More advanced Linux / Windows music collection controller - want to
burn music, modify playlists, import music, etc - things outside of the
typical tv appliance arena.  Things more quickly and easily handled in a
typical pc application environment.


Obviously a pretty big task.  My main goals I would like to see
accomplished:
	- Make the playing of music easy, fast and enjoyable.
	- Greatly speed up the responsiveness of the system.  I have a large
collection and when I first go into mythmusic now it takes a long time to
load info about entire collection.  Not necessary when all I want to do is
listen to one specific album.  I should be able to very quickly navigate
through a tree to get there.
	Be able to play music while watching tv, scheduling things, etc...

Once again not knocking anything already done, just see an opportunity to do
make improvements and it seems there are others out there as well with
similar ideals.  To me this is not so much a myth project but something else
that provides a plug-in allowing a myth enabled device to connect to and
play content from this music library.

I have been scouring sourceforge and the net for other open source player
projects that might provide a good basis for the centralized master backend
server.  No need to necessarily re-invent everything from the ground up.
Found a couple.  Still looking.

Hopefully I have time to work on this also with all my other committments.