[uf-discuss] Proposed microformat: Music

[Rod Begbie]

Hello Chaps.

I've been lurking for a wee while, trying to get me head round an idea
I would like to see.

My goal is the creation of a music-description microformat.

The vision I have is HTML markup which will allow an application or
script to easily find artist/album/track type information on a webpage.

An example client use would be reading an album review, and having a
Greasemonkey script find out if that album's in
Rhapsody/Napster/AllyoucaneatMusicProvider's library so you can listen
to it yourself.  Or browsing to a friend's last.fm page and being able
to tell Songbird to play everything in your library that's in their
Top 50 tracks.

The example server usage is to separate out the "metadata" from the
music file into the HTML, so that something like the Creative Commons
search crawler can find the metadata for an MP3 file without having to
download + parse the file.

There've been a couple of attempts at creating "media" microformats so
far.  Both have attempted too much, IMO, by seeking to describe any
bit of media (music, speech, images, film).  Far too complex.

I'd like to focus purely on music.  There are plenty of examples of
the small-amount of data needed to "capture" a piece of music.  Also,
this is something that can be used as a building block in review or
product microformats to help describe what is being, erm, described.

So before I charge into creating a wiki page and cutting-n-pasting
some of the examples off of media-info-examples, anyone got any
comments or anything they want to warn me of?

Cheers,

Rod.

[PS. As a quick full-disclosure-type disclaimer:  Although my day job
is at a consumer electronics company which is quite closely associated
with music, I'm doing this on my own time and of my own volition.]

--
:: Rod Begbie :: http://groovymother.com/ ::