If you dig too deep into media metadata, and you have a thing for perfection, on the other side of the old Dublin Core¹ spec up to our days, once back from journeys into smart personal ratings, custom-made encyclopedic listening UX, editing MusicBrainz like a madman, getting to side between Hydrogen audio and (heretic) "subjectivists", and yet more obscure (anal?) DAC & post-processing settings, there will come a day when you want to embed everything, even the freaking bit-perfect player itself in the meta of each.single.file (a few hundred KB for e.g. Foobar2K, nothing against the mega or gigabytes of media files, right?) — such that any file plays as a standalone program, with the perfectly designed ad-hoc viewing interface and playback/rendering settings. Whether a book, video, audio, even website, whatever. Gimme the one-thing self-run app-less paradigm.

That day, when it begins to sound like an actual, legit good idea to write thousands of times the same piece of software in your music, photo, book, or video library, all the while tweaking parameters individually for each collection (each album, season…), and you can actually justify it rationally as a future time-saver because you already spent that much time fiddling with meta-'stuff' instead of enjoying pieces of content themselves…

Then maybe, just maybe, it's time to focus on your sanity, get a life, grab a spoon, and let smarter people (and more importantly bigger teams) than the army of you_alone_in_the_dark solve the problem of sorting the world's data. Or at least, for f#$%'s sake at the very least, get paid to do it. Because let's face it, it has become a job to listen to music "properly", and that's probably not good for your vascular tension.

Also, the world has moved to streaming in the meantime. Deal with it.

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1: have funsies https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-t...

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Disclaimer: Any resemblance with my real life is obviously fortuitous. It is also absolutely preposterous to think that this kicked off a journey that led me to learn Linux, virtualizations/containers of all kinds (like VFIO/virtio, cgroups, deep-level stuff), eventually programming… It is expressly not because I had to "translate" some bullshit ID3vX into Vorbis comments that I wrote my first Python lines way back when. And nothing in here is of any interest to any of you whatsoever. Except, find the hardest problem you can see and try to solve it. You likely won't if it's really hard, but the journey is its own reward.