Introduction¶
About the Internet Archive Metadata Model¶
Note
This is just a brief introduction to get you accustomed to some basic Internet Archive concepts and terminology related to this Mopidy extension. For more in-depth information, please refer to the FAQ, or start with this blog post.
Files published on the Internet Archive are organized in so-called items. An item is a directory or folder that includes the originally uploaded content – audio, video, text, etc. – along with any derivative files created from the originals, and some metadata that describes the item. An item may contain a single audio file, or a related set of audio files that represent a CD or a taped live concert. All the files within an item have the same metadata, such as (album) title, creator, description, and so on. For the purpose of this Mopidy extension, Internet Archive items are treated as albums, and the included audio files show up as the album’s tracks.
Every item also has a unique identifier, which can be used to access the item on the Internet Archive’s Web site:
http://archive.org/details/{identifier}
In Mopidy, you may encounter item identifiers in an album URI’s path, while individual tracks add the respective file name as their URI’s fragment.
Besides items containing media files, there are also collections, which are used to to group related items. The Live Music Archive, for example, is the collection with the identifier etree. An item can be a member of more than one collection, and collections may also have sub-collections. Within the Live Music Archive, there exist sub-collections for all artists that gave permission for live show recordings to be hosted on archive.org, such as the Grateful Dead or the Smashing Pumpkins, while the Live Music Archive itself is a sub-collection of the larger Audio Archive. Within Mopidy, collections most prominently show up as top-level directories when browsing the Internet Archive, but can also be used to exclude specific items from searching and browsing [1].
Browsing the Internet Archive¶
Starting with version 0.18, Mopidy also provides the possiblity to
browse directories and tracks. If your client supports this, there
should be a virtual directory named Internet Archive. When
browsing, Internet Archive items are structured into a hierarchy three
levels deep. At the top level, you will find the collections
configured under internetarchive/collections, and you will
be able to browse individual audio items (albums) and files (tracks)
within these.
For practical and performance reasons, the number of audio items that
will be shown within a collection is limited, e.g. you will not see
all 144,957 items of the Live Music Archive [2]. The
default configuration sets this limit to 100, but
this can be changed with internetarchive/browse_limit.
Items are selected based on popularity by default, i.e. the 100 most
downloaded items will be listed for each collection. This can also be
changed using internetarchive/browse_order, e.g. to always
show the latest additions to the Archive.
Searching the Internet Archive¶
The Internet Archive only supports searching for items, but not for individual files or tracks. Therefore, only albums will show up when searching in Mopidy, which may not be handled correctly by your client. This also means that only album-related search fields are supported, i.e. searching for track names or numbers will yield no results from the Internet Archive.
The number and ordering of search results returned from the Internet
Archive can be changed with internetarchive/search_limit
and internetarchive/search_order, similar to the settings
used for browsing.
Archive Bookmarks¶
If you have an Internet Archive account - also termed a Virtual
Library Card - you can access your Archive Bookmarks from Mopidy.
To do so, you need to add your Internet Archive user name to Mopidy’s
configuration as internetarchive/username. Your bookmarks
will then appear in the top-level browse directory as Archive
Bookmarks.
Note
It is currently not possible to edit your Archive Bookmarks using Mopidy. This restriction may be removed in future versions.
Footnotes
| [1] | If you really don’t like the Grateful Dead, for example. |
| [2] | As of 2015-09-11. |