Comment by chrismorgan
5 years ago
How would SQLite go as for something like Audacity projects? Audacity projects are a pile of files: an XML file that declares the project metadata, tracks, channels, envelopes (an example of non-destructive editing), and references to the zillions of audio files that it drops in a directory beside the XML file (typically less than 1MB each).
I presume it splits all the audio up into small files so that most types of edits can only need to touch a small area.
If you directly ported that to SQLite, would it work fairly well, or would you want to restructure it somehow? Things like additions or deletions, would it need to write lots of extra data to the disk (would it be doing something like defragmenting, or would it grow larger than it should, or are there other tricks that I don’t know about to delete a chunk from the middle of a file without needing to rewrite all of the file beyond that point)?
Adobe Lightroom seems comparable (non-destructive image editing.) It uses a sqlite database that points to image files on the filesystem. I think precisely the same approach could be taken with an audio editing application.
You could also consider putting the audio files into the sqlite db, which might work alright. I've heard of image thumbnails being stored in sqlite dbs (maybe by Lightroom iirc?) though those are probably smaller than your audio clips I'm guessing.