What I’d really like to see is a standard database design for media libraries.

I use different media players for different purposes, and also different media players across platforms. It’s annoying as hell to have to refresh the database for each whenever there is a change, especially when your music collection is pushing 280 gigs. Lets just say it takes more than a couple of hours.

It’s be really nice if someone came up with a database design that suited the needs of the different applications, and if the developers making the media players would support it. That’s assuming there isn’t already one…

My ideal set-up would be my server running a Postgres database which could be connected to from my laptop/workstation/PDA with concurrent users. It’d also support play-lists, fields for BPM and harmonic analysis, and album covers, all saved in the database. Also, personalised tagging systems and last.fm integrated tagging.

Anybody heard of any initiatives like that? I know there are client/server based media software, but DBMSs are already designed with that purpose in mind and most hi-end media players use some kind of SQL database to store results, even if it’s SQLite.