Is there a way of editing the MPD database direct?

[shardwick]

@shardwick

Wow, radio has come a long way in the half century since I was my college radio station's chief engineer---small Collins console flanked by heavy turntables, a storage room walled with shelves groaning under the 20 years accumulation of LPs, and a badly maintained set of 3x5 index cards. Oh, yeah, and a couple of luggable reel-to-reel tape recorders 'cuz we had the job of taping live performances at the college.

Hi Kent, It certainly has.  I recognise the picture you paint but when I started my career in the mid 90s I literally just missed the last analogue editing methods, reel-to-reel tape and razor blades were just being retired. 

I learnt basic editing using a minidisc deck (divide and conquer method!) and very shortly computer based editing started to appear, Sadie, Pro-tools and Cool Edit Pro being the most common, which made the process a whole lot easier! I still have CD players and cart machines, once the bastion of the radio studio and once worth many thousands of pounds, now simply gathering dust in lofts and sheds of radio employees (myself included) who don't quite have the heart to throw them away!  Nowadays you can run an entire radio station on a raspberry pi (at a push!) but most professional outfits still use high end server PCs for reliability. Engineers need to be IT minded as everything is migrating to IP, even the consoles!

I've never been able to find a description of the MPD "database". The API index has a smattering of entries under data structures but this index is generated from the code and the code is sparsely commented.
 
You can reach out to the MPD maintainer, Max Kellerman, through forum.mpd.org. Candidly, I'm not sure his position has changed since 2015 when he wrote there in response to a database question, "The database for storing music metadata is custom. Do not read the file. Use the MPD protocol to query it." Perhaps if you lead with your radio work you'll get a more sympathetic response.

The source code for MPD is held on github with principal database routines under https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD...ter/src/db 
If you're a C++ boffin you might be able to deduce the database structure. I tried once but quickly backed away before my brain exploded  

Thanks for the info. Sadly I'm not a C++ boffin but I'll have a poke around the code you link to in case it makes sense.  I guess if the scanning code is there, something could be written to modify that to take the info from CSV rather than reading files in a folder.  If any C++ boffins are reading I'd be happy to throw some money at this so do get in touch!

Cheers

s