[uf-discuss] a microformat for audio track metadata

Chris Messina chris.messina at gmail.com
Wed Nov 2 14:03:35 PST 2005


One other thing to consider w/r/t to using "rel" is how we mark up
media in a webpage. We've got embed and object, of course, but I want
to see a much more semantic way of embedding media in XHTML -- even if
we use those tags to get the actual media to be playable.

Here's my use case:

Record some audio. Save file to desktop. Want to podcast it. Open up
my blog editor, drag and drop media file into the post. Hit "publish".
The media file gets sent up to a repository in the sky and ends up
both as an RSS enclosure as well as a "play button" on my blog.

Pulling in rich meta data from the ID3 tags would also be nice... or
allowing me to add data around the file, like:

Track: My stupid dog
Artist: Some rock band
[   play button   ]

So if we can mark that up some standard way AND allow people to view
the media in situ, that would rock. Literally.

Chris

On 11/2/05, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar <drernie at opendarwin.org> wrote:
> Hi Greg,
>
> > 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.
>
> I don't know about 'obvious', but you should definitely take a look at:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/media-metadata-examples
> http://microformats.org/wiki/video-metadata-model
>
> I don't know if there's as consensus about whether audio, video, and
> podcasting are all the same microformat, but at the very least they
> need to be developed out of a shared understanding.
>
> -- Ernie P.
>
>
>
> On Nov 2, 2005, at 10:26 AM, Greg Borenstein wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > microformats-discuss mailing list
> > microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>
> ------------
> Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. <drernie at opendarwin.org>
> Ex-Physicist, Marketing Weenie, and Dilettante Hacker
> Probe-Hacker blog: http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/
>
>
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>


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