I'm hoping that this type of 'filesystem as a utility' becomes a common method of chaining programs together, simmilar to the pipe.<p>On a related note, another FUSE filesystem I have used is ciopfs [1] which makes a case insensitive filesystem from a given folder. Very useful for running windows programs that are incidentally platform independent (as in written in a language like Java) and break on case sensitive filesystems.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/ciopfs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/ciopfs/</a>
This reminds me of a very fun assignment we had in college: we had to implement a FUSE filesystem to extract ID3 tags from MP3s. This was part of our OS class to learn about the filesystem (while at the same time we were diving into the Linux kernel).<p>I'd really recommend to anyone who wants to understand more about filesystems to write your own FUSE filesystem. It isn't difficult (assuming you have a basic understanding of C), they run in userspace so they can't mess things up too badly, and it is really gratifying to drag/drop files into a folder and have <i>magic</i> happen.
Huh, I had used MP3fs or something like it years ago. I see this project's code dates back to 2006, so maybe this was it? Glad to see it lives on :)
Very cool. I had this same idea (and of course secretly hoped I was the first to have thought of it, but that's rarely the case) just the other day, as I found myself having to re-encode a bunch of FLAC files purchased at HDtracks.com to M4A, since Spotify for some absurd reason doesn't support FLAC. It's straightforward enough with ffmpeg, but it's yet another annoying step required before you can listen to the music.
Alternative: This script synchronizes a music collection recursively one way from a
lossless format source directory to a lossy file format target directory.<p><a href="https://bitbucket.org/ghorvath/music-collection-sync" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/ghorvath/music-collection-sync</a>