Target audience
Albumine is targeted at everyone who has a music collection (or wants to have one). It will hardly help you if you have a couple of songs you downloaded here and there, but if you download whole albums or rip CDs often, it may make your life easier.
Foundational principles
Music is naturally organized into albums. Therefore it is logical to organize the collection so that this natural structure is utilized to the full extent.
If your collection becomes larger than a couple of songs and starts to look serious,
you start to count music in albums. Album is your storage unit.
Yet most music databases do not honor this fact, focusing on individual songs.
While it is useful to browse and search through all your music on a song-by-song
basis when you have ten, fifty or one hundred songs, as soon as the number
of items reaches thousands and tens of thousands, you feel an urge to go to a larger scale.
Albumine is targeted to help you get your collection in order, and do so without
tedious manual work
Automation
Each album has unique attributes, such as artist name, album name, year,
bitrate, number of tracks, size and such. If you want your collection to be
descriptive, you will want all this info in your database. However, collecting
all this info manually is an incredibly boring repetitive work.
Albumine addresses this problem by automation of data collection process. It
will collect all the data for you. You only have to point to a directory and it
appears in the database as an album. Moreover, you are in charge, not the program.
If there are multiple choices for a value, the program will let you choose. For
example, if songs by several artists were found in a directory, the program will
let you choose an artist name or "various artists" or any text you want.
Ease of location
A large collection is often (if not always) spread over a large number of
media, such as CD-Rs, DVD-Rs or folders on hard drives. It is important to
be able to locate the required album if you suddenly want to hear it or if a friend
asked you to make a copy. Now imagine having to find (and copy) some three hundred albums
on your collection that lies in your closet recorded on 100s of CD-Rs.
Albumine allows to attach a location attribute (such as CD-R number or directory path)
to every album, making the album easy to locate.
Formats
Open and standards-compliant formats are crucial to progress and development.
Albumine uses an XML format for storing the database. The format is designed to be
both compact and transparent enough to be human-readable. Albumine can also export
to text, which you can easily import to OpenOffice.Calc, Gnumeric or Redmond office suite.
Support for other export formats is planned.
Customizeable
Albumine is designed to be customizeable. If you don't need certain information in your collection, just say so. If you want some extra fields to fill in manually (like language of lyrics, etc), it's easy to setup. A possibility is reserved to even allow automated collection of such custom info (via shell scripts) in future versions.