Importing huge music files into database

Question

Hi,

We have very huge music files in mp3 formats (very huge more than 1,000,000) and would like to import all these songs into the DB of an application we are developing. Is there any easy method to import such huge files at once. Kindly let me know

Answer 1

Why not just use a filesystem for them - that's what file systems are designed for? Index the filenames in a normalised DB.

Answer 2

Yes, there is

Take a look at how has Apple solved that problem. Go to the iTunes_control folder on the iPod. You'll see that there's a Music sub folder with dozens of folders named f00, f01, ... f50 (50 is arbitrarily big number). Every file has been renamed to a filename that looks like a hash value.

Use the file system to store the files. In the database store the path to the file on the file system together with the mp3 metadata information (artist, name, album, composer, etc) and provide search capabilities over it.

Answer 3

You don't want to store music into the database. Store some kind of URLs to music into the database, with all the metadata you want to keep, and store music into folders on various servers. I am author of radio automation software that used this scheme and we never looked back at our decision.

Main reason for that is that you don't want anyone to be dependent on some database API to extract the music.