Things I Won't Do


Here's a list of things that a number of people have suggested I should add into AGQT but that I've decided not to implement, along with an explanation of why not.

"Various Artists" / "Original Soundtrack" Albums
This actually works to some degree with the new "fdb" program.

Alternatives to AllMusic.Com
I did the FreeDB one because it seemed like a good idea to have a time based matching one, and FreeDB's timing are definitely better than AllMusic.Com's. But I'd need a similarly compelling reason to do more of them.

Web Interface
I'm sorry but that just seems silly to me -- a web interface to a command line interface to a web interface. A number of people have E-mailed me to tell me they're working on making em', though, and more power to you guys I guess.

Multiple Queries in Parallel Threads
I've thought about it, and this wouldn't actually be all that difficult to implement. But the problem with it is that since I don't have a GUI and don't want one, it would end up producing very jumbled, difficult to follow output, since each thread would output stuff to the screen at random times. The "am" logfile would end up very jumbled and difficult to follow too.

I rather like the way it looks right now, with the little half-squares around each excution of "ag."

And anyway I'm not really sure there's all that much to gain by having the queues run in parallel. Sure, they'd finish faster, but you'd still have to wait for the actual transfers to finish too, which always takes longer than the queues even in their present form. So why change it?

Matching Versions' Times To AllMusic.Com
This is really the whole point of the new "fdb" module that works with FreeDB, but I'm not sure how effective an idea it is.

Renaming Downloads After They're Completed
This is a suggestion that's been made several times but which is quite impractical. It's impractical because AGQT is not aware of the exact filenames of the songs that are being downloaded. When fdb calls ag, ag doesn't even look at the text returned by the search results at all -- it only looks at the times. When am calls ag, ag does look at the text of the results, but only at the "song title" part. This happens because AudioGalaxy can return search results in several different formats and it would be too confusing to derive the "artist name" part of the track from all the different formats.

Another and more obvious thing that makes this impossible is that AGQT does not directly communicate with the Satellite at all, and in fact the Satellite may very well run on a completely separate computer and everything would still work fine. So AGQT doesn't really know when your transfers are finished, and which transfers correspond to the files it queued or what directory the files it queued will end up in. So it can't really do anything with the finished files.