could need some advice on architecture

[Frank Skare]

Hello,

I have a lot MP3's and I want to build a simple
MP3 player that helps me to sort out MP3 files that
I don't like that much and want to delete. Instead
of simply adding a delete feature which will delete
a MP3 file permanently I want to build a rate system
in order to delete tracks only if they were rated bad
a few times. A simple solution would be using
a hashtable and the artist and track name as key and
the rate as value and use serialization to persist the
hashtable. The problem with this is many files are
not tagged and named yet so the key may get broke
so I need a key build of the binary data structure
of the file. I wonder if there are general/popular
ways to do this and I wonder if there are books about
such things? I hate to ask this kind of question
because it makes me feel small as programmer.

Also I wonder if it's better to use a database which
I haven't worked with so far. I'm focused on code
simplicity, I want to hack the player in a short time
with few lines of code.

Thanks,
stax

 

[Mad Murdoch]

You could consider using a checksum of the file itself, this is likely to be
almost surely unique (unless you have duplicates ) alternatively why not use
one of the predifined fields for MP3 to store a GUID in and use this for
identification.

I have not really thought this through, just a top of the head reply

 

[Frank Skare]

You could consider using a checksum of the file itself, this is likely to be
almost surely unique (unless you have duplicates ) alternatively why not use
one of the predifined fields for MP3 to store a GUID in and use this for
identification.

thanks, checksum was the magic word. I found a article:

http://vbaccelerator.com/home/NET/Code/Libraries/CRC32/article.asp