Xion Community

I know there are a lot of good suggestions for the Library out there, but most I've seen require some sort of database, requiring more time/resources to develop.

One idea that I hope would be easy to implement would be the way 1by1 does it's media selection:
http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1scr.html
It shows a directory tree/explorer window and you can select everything (recursively) in a directory. This shouldn't be too memory intensive, should it? No need for a database as it could be read at access time, but it might get slow if there is a large directory structure underneath. For the record, the whole download of 1by1 is 119k.

the good thing with having a database is it can be indexed, you can search on it, create queries which can be customised to your own preferences.
And with that your not actually looking at files just indexed records so speed is paramount.

People are picky about their media libraries, you only have to look at the many other media apps out there to see so many different ways ppl like to format their tracks/albums/artists/genres etc...
I think possibly some kind of hybrid combination would work well but I see this going somewhere near the db route myself.

Understood, but I was purely going for speed and ability to implement. I would imagine that you would have to access the functions of windows explorer to implement, but that is less that the average user has to download.

I may have found my own solution for now. Uberview (http://uberview.org/) is a 42k download that shows a unified library (Can span multiple locations/drives), generates playlists and searches for album art. I had known about it for a couple of years, but hadn't really needed it until now.

Scratch that. Uberview doesn't play well with other players (it seems to like winamp, which not using winamp was the reason to use the tool.) It seem to work ok with one album selected, but not multiple albums, which was the reason I tried it in the first place.