Bug#517090: Playing MP3 CDs/DVDs created by iTunes

[Rogério Brito]

Package: rhythmbox
Priority: wishlist

Hi.

I would like to kindly request a new feature that I have not yet  
noticed in any of the Linux music players (be them rhythmbox, amarok,  
quodlibet, audacious etc).

I think that this would be a great thing for the GNOME Desktop (and  
for others too), since it would increase the interoperability with  
other Operating Systems.

The feature is the following: Apple's iTunes player has the  
possibility of playing both CD-DA (with the metadata taken from  
databases like gnudb, freedb or, in the particular case of iTunes,  
gracenote). I don't have any problems with this, for plain CDs.

OK. The nice feature that it has is the ability to burn MP3/AAC CDs  
taken from playlists, neatly organize them in a filesystem structure  
of the format:

<artist>/<album>/<song>

and (this is the nice thing), generate a xml file with the contents  
of the MP3 CD in a way that it is playable just like a CD-DA, but  
with the desired features that:

* it doesn't need a connection to the Internet to grab metadata  
(which is, of course, stored both in the xml file and in some file's  
metadata). This means that no network connection is necessary to have  
information about songs.

* the MP3 CD is treated like a CD-DA, but with a much longer capacity  
(say, 12 hours, depending on the bitrate of the songs and their  
lengths).

* the songs don't have to be imported into playlists and not even  
queued for playing. Just selecting the first song to be played is  
enough for it to play the songs (and, of course, it is not always  
that we want to import songs to our library).

Not only iTunes can create such CDs, but it can also create DVDs,  
which, of course, means that the capacity of those "CDs" is way, way  
longer than that of usual audio CDs and in a convenient way to carry  
them around.

It would be really nice to be able to play such CDs/DVDs with  
rhythmbox, as an improvement on the interoperability factor (and  
convenience). In the case of Unix players, more formats could be  
considered, of course, than just MP3 and Low Comlexity AAC.

If it were able to create such CDs, then everything would be a dream  
come true and many other friends of mine would miss one program less  
from their Macs/Windows boxes.

Thanks in advance, Rogério Brito.