[uf-discuss] a microformat for audio track metadata

[Greg Borenstein]

Hello,

I'm a recent subscriber to the list and a first time poster. As a  
musician and avid mp3 blog reader, I'm especially interested in the  
case of using microformats to provide metadata for audio files linked  
from the web. I think that if there was a simple format for this a  
lot of bloggers would use it and that data could be very valuable for  
services trying to aggregate song information from these bloggers'  
feeds (i.e. Hype Machine [1]). After reading the information on the  
wiki and as many discussions on this topic as I could find on this  
list, I thought I might tentatively put forward a structure.

Here's my initial thought:

<a href="http://domain.com/song.mp3" rel="track"><span class="track- 
creator">Artist</span> - <span class="track-title">Song</span></a>

I'm using the field names "track-creator" and "track-title" from the  
XSPF spec, which fits the "reuse" part of the microformats ethic and  
would allow compatibility with hPlaylist (Lucas Gonze's proposed  
format for XSPF playlists) [2] . This would also set an obvious  
precedent whereby additional metadata could be described with the  
appropriate class names from the hPlaylist spec.  Also, I've tried to  
accurately reflect the semantic relationship with the markup as  
Tantek advocates (the metadata is a subset of the linked file so the  
spans that contain it should be themselves contained within the  
anchor tag that points at the file.

One important choice about which I was not fully confident was the  
idea of using rel="track". Is this too vague? Should it be  
rel="audio"? Also, I know that there are more precise ways of  
indicating media types of linked URIs but I thought a rel tag might  
accurately reflect the relationship of the link while remaining  
lightweight enough to actually come into use by blogger-types  
(especially since rel tags have begun to become familiar with the  
amazing success of rel="tag").

I would greatly appreciate any productive feedback you may have for  
me. If I have overlooked some particularly obvious resource that I  
should have consulted in my thinking on all of this stuff, I  
apologize and would be glad to hear about it.

Thanks,

Greg
greg at mfdz.com
http://mfdz.com/atduskgreg
http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens

[1] http://hype.non-standard.net
[2] http://gonze.com/microformats/xspfxmdp.html