This is the nicest way of doing it, but it has a *NASTY* side effect. The
rip-encode process is very sensitive to slight changes -- the audio ripping
process is not deterministic. If you rip one track once and then rip it
again, it is unlikely that the two ripped wav files will be bit-for-bit the
same. Also, if you using two different MP3 encoders would also yield two
different MP3s at the end. My point is that if two people rip the same
track, even though its the same length and they may sound identical, they
are not going to yield the same hash.
So, the user will not be able to come up with an authoritative hash by just
deriving it from 4 bytes from every 20k. Unfortunately.
What needs to happen is that when someone is ripping/encoding a track, they
CD should be looked up in the CD index. The CD Index will then provide the
ripper with a set of IDs for each track. The encoder can then stash that
track in the metadata (ID3vX, or whatever) so that the player can uniquely
identify this track.
--ruaok Freezerburn! All else is only icing. -- Soul Coughing
Robert Kaye -- robert nospam at moon.eorbit.net http://moon.eorbit.net/~robert