[Omni Features Development] JoeSyr:
So I noticed a commit in the gerrit for cleaning up duplicate notifications in 5.0 (link), and I took it upon myself to re-check the current list on my device (running a fairly recent 4.4 build), and turned up about a half dozen more dupes. I had suspected that there were a few when I last browsed the list a few months ago. I commented these to the relevant JIRA report that begot the original cleanup (link), which I assume is enough to bring it to the right person's attention (since the item still seems to be watched).

In the process of doing this I pulled all of the ringtones, notification, and alarm files onto my computer. I was sort of struck by how sloppy the collection looks in terms of how it's been organized. I think I can tell that some effort has been put in to at least give everything a uniformly capitalized title in the metadata, but is this all coming from AOSP, even the duplicates? Did Omni just inherit a frankensteined collection that's been passed around through the custom ROM scene, with people adding their favorites as they went? To be fair, a lot of what strikes me as sloppy seems to have no impact on usability (I'm just a stickler for clean metadata standards in my own music collection), but I thought I'd raise the issues just in case there's room to establish some best practices. Here's a few things that struck me:

-A few files declare "Copyright (c) 2009 Android Open Source Project", but the majority do not mention copyright at all. Are they known/assumed to be made available for distribution? A large number of these files are tagged with "Dr Mad" as the artist. As far as I can tell, these tracks may have been created by this person, and they may have been provided to/distributed by Sony Ericsson at some point in the past (this information seems unreliable, as it comes from random comments found in google results). There's another notable subset that credits "pdx", and there's a few other names that contribute a couple of tracks each. My attempt to google these names was largely fruitless, except that Dave Sparks was apparently involve in Android audio circa 2010-2011 and his name is on a few tracks.

-A few of these files have metadata that, while not causing any problems, is the sort of thing I'd strip out just for cleanup. Some have artwork embedded, the pdx tracks all use gibberish for track numbers. There's a few stray tracks that uselessly declare other fields like 0 for discnumber or unknown for album.

-The collection is a mix of mono/stereo tracks, and also 44100Hz/48000Hz. Is this completely inconsequential, or would some of these files result on poor quality sound on some devices? I couldn't help but notice that a number of tracks sounded distinctly nicer on my computer vs my phone, but within the wide range of hardware in android devices, I wouldn't personally know where to start in terms of saying if various encoding settings make much of a difference.

-The majority, but not all, of these files use a custom metadata tag titled "ANDROID_LOOP". This seems self explanatory as to whether the sound should loop or not when being played (the ringtones and alarms that use it declare it as true, the notifications declare it as false). But, given that not all tracks use it and there seems to be no functional difference(i.e. a notification that fails to declare it as false doesn't loop during the preview picker), is it something that used to be important but has been deprecated?

Since, as I said, the current collection looks like it's just accumulated without much particular direction or attention to standards over time, I downloaded a "stock" nexus 6 rom and peaked at what Google's shipping these days. The list is much shorter, and the files are nicely standardized. No extraneous metadata, files are a uniform Stereo recording [MENTION=1547742]4800[/MENTION]0Hz, all encoded with the same vorbis encoder version too. That is to say, the collection was put together with a basic but clear intention to ship a polished set of sounds.

Is this the kind of thing that's worth cleaning up? Does Omni strive to track AOSP or imitate the nexus line for subjective things like this? Has it ended up with a messy snowball of random odds and ends because that's what custom ROM users have come to expect over the past several years?