RE: Sound in Emacs

[Drew Adams]

>>> A project id like to get going is setting up a database
>>> type app for sound - something similar to various
>>> photo-managers - where info from a sound gets stored
>>> and managed - diskfile, region, format, tags and
>>> metadata of all sorts - - and made available through a
>>> general interface.  Send a query to find certain regions
>>> from some files, and ask a running sound-editor to show
>>> them.  Edit them, update metadata info, headers etc. on
>>> a set of matches (ie. add a tag or similar) etc.
>j>
>j> All filetypes can be meta tagged the same way technically. then
>j> you need a common storage(I've been experimenting with rdf
>j> indexing on top of xattrs) and indeed Emacs is ideal for large
>j> scale tagging.
> 
> I dont know of any existing things doing this, which is a 
> pity, it would make for a very effective tool for managing
> all kinds of large collections of sound.  There are some
> metadata-editors for sound around, but afaik only 'standalone'
> apps, really not offering much more in functionality than
> file-browsers.
> 
> One obvious problem in a db-approach is keeping collected info updated
> after say moving files around or editing them.
> 
> This could be managed by including historic information in the actual
> files (version, name, location...) for a 'detective'-script to be able
> to keep track of new names, locations or other changes, and keep a db
> updated accordingly.

FWIW/FYI-

No doubt it does not correspond to everything you both are envisioning, but
Bookmark+ lets you easily register (aka "bookmark") any type of file, associate
metatdata with it, tag it in various ways and access it using tag set
operations, attach any additional code to its activation (aka "jumping to it"),
group it in various ways with other files (e.g. a playlist), and so on.  

(Not sure what you meant by "regions", but you can also bookmark specific
regions of text files.  And bookmarks generally handle "moving around",
renaming, and editing.)

Possibly some of what you envision could be built using what is already there -
dunno.  Mentioning Bookmark+ because much of what you describe sounds similar.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BookmarkPlus

Alternatively, you can perhaps leverage Org mode's features involving metadata
and tagging - dunno.  And then there is Stefan's Music Player Daemon (MPD) -
dunno about that either, but it sounds like it employs an actual "database"
(unlike Bookmark+ (and Org, I imagine), which holds the metadata in plain text
files).