			   Music Librarian

0) Overview

  Music Librarian is a tool for organizing a collection, large or
small, of music.  It is presently designed to "do one thing and do it
well".

  Music Librarian was created after I tried several "tagging"
programs.  These programs had many powerful features, but I found
their interfaces to be very awkward for performing simple operations,
while their more powerful features were not particularly useful for
me.

  Music Librarian provides a sensible (for me :-) ) point-and-click
interface from which to manipulate tags.  As a bonus, it has a name
which indicates what it is, rather than being a clever play on musical
terminology.

  The only music file formats presently supported by Music Librarian
are .ogg and .mp3.  Additional formats could be added with a little
work.  In theory one just needs to write a new file class in
library.py, but if the new file type doesn't conform to the
assumptions made elsewhere, more changes might be necessary.

  Music Librarian is free software licensed under the GNU GPL.  A copy
of the GPL should have been distributed with this copy of the program.

1) Installation

  Note that installation is not necessary: Music Librarian runs just
fine from its source directory.  The executable name is
"music-librarian".

  To install Music Librarian under the same prefix as your Python
installation, run "./setup.py install" as root.

  While the setup script allows you to specify a different
installation prefix, *this is not presently a supported
configuration*.  Because musiclibrarian contains some data files, you
will have to edit the main program and tell it where its data files
are.  This is obviously not ideal, and I will allow arbitrary
installations in a future release (this may require moving away from
Python's distutils, which don't appear to provide hooks for rewriting
files based on the installation prefix)

2) Usage

  Music Librarian works on "libraries".  A library is simply a
directory; Music Librarian will search that directory and any
subdirectories for music files of a known type (file types are
recognized by their extension).

  You can provide a library as a command-line argument, or open one
after the program starts.  Once the library is opened, you will see a
list of all the files contained in it.  Initially, this list will be
organized into categories based on the artist and album of each file,
but you can select alternate organization rules from the "View" menu.

  You can also store a definition for a library, by selecting "Create
Library From View" (or from the "Edit Libraries" dialog).  If you
create a library and set it to be the "default", that library will be
loaded when the program starts (unless a different library is
requested on the command-line, of course).

  To edit tags, either double-click on the tags you want to change in
the list of files, or select one or more files and press the "Edit
Tags" button.

  Music Librarian does not presently offer the ability to set tags
based on filenames, or to rename files based on tags.  If you need
these features, a program such as "cantus" might be useful for you --
or if you speak Python, you could add them to Music Librarian.

3) Additional information

  The Music Librarian website is http://alioth.debian.org/musiclibrarian.
The code for the project is kept in a Subversion repository stored at
http://svn.debian.org.  The author of the code (and this README) is
Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>

  To see some of the future plans for the program, see the TODO file
included in this distribution.
