audio-album-brainstorming

Discussion Participants

Editors

• Manu Sporny, Bitmunk - Digital Bazaar, Inc.

Contributors

• Manu Sporny
• Martin McEvoy
• Alexandre Van De Sande

Purpose

The audio album microformat creates a standard method of marking up metadata and information about a collection of audio recordings discussed on a web page. One goal of the audio album microformat is to support the hAudio microformat.

Terminology

This section explores the terminology that should used to discuss an audio album microformat.

Discovered Elements

There were several elements that were identified during the discovery process as being good first-implementation candidates. They are listed below in order of popularity.

artist

Frequency: 95%+ in 91 sites

The artist information was found on all pages related to audio recordings. This usually consisted of an artist name, band name, or orchestra name. This field could more loosely be described as the primary content creator. Additional contributors could be listed using the role property of vcard.

Recommendations

It is recommended that artist name be wrapped in a vcard inside a 'contributor' tag. This re-uses what has already been defined in the hAudio specification. For example:

<span class="contributor">
 <span class="vcard">
  <span class="fn org">Green Day</span>
 </span>
</span>

or:

<span class="contributor">
 <div class="vcard">
  <span class="fn">Green Day</span> (<span class="role">artist</span>)
 </div>
</span>

title

Frequency: 94% in 91 sites

The title of the album was almost as prevalent as the artist name. This was usually a simple text value.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the title be implemented as a simple span tag:

<span class="album-title">I Have A Dream</span>

tracks (track/song listing)

Frequency: 85% in 91 sites

Usually on a page listing an album or a podcast, a listing of tracks/songs available in the collection was detailed on the same page.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the tracks be hAudio items.

Album example:

<div class="halbum">
 <span class="album-title">Audio Album Name</span> by
 <span class="contributor">
  <span class="vcard">
   <span class="fn org">Audio Album Artist Name</span>
  </span>
 </span>
 <ol>
  <li class="track">
   <div class="haudio">
    <span class="audio-title">Track 1</span>
   </div>
  </li>
 <li class="track">
  <div class="haudio">
   <span class="audio-title">Track 2</span>
  </div>
 </li>
 <li class="track">
  <div class="haudio">
   <span class="audio-title">Track 3</span>
  </div>
 </li>
</div>

release date

Frequency: 75% on 91 sites

A release date is usually specified for the date that the album hit the streets. This is almost always in a standard date format.

Recommendations

The release date should probably use the already well established datetime-design-pattern. A date/time could look like the following:

<abbr class="published" title="20051010T10:10:10-0100">October 10th, 2005</abbr>

acquire

Frequency: 62% of 91 sites

The acquire discovery pertains to legal acquisition of the audio material in it's entirety (not a sample). Most of these acquisitions methods are web-based purchases. Some of them are free downloads and a small number of them are online purchases for physical goods. A URL is almost always listed to begin the process (be it checkout, download site selection, format selection).

Recommendations

It is recommended that acquisition method use the already well established rel-design-pattern. An acquisition link could look like the following:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/acquire/4858372839" rel="acquire">Purchase/Download URL</a>

photo

Frequency: 59% of 85 sites

The image summary is a visual still-frame image summary of the content. In the case of an album, it is the album cover image. In the case of a speech, it can be an image of the speaker. In the case of an audio song - the album cover image would be adequate.

Recommendations

It is recommended that an image is used for the image summary.

 <span class="image-summary"><img src="album_cover.jpg" alt="Album Cover" /></span>

genre

Frequency: 59% of 91 sites

The genre describes the type of music, be it blues, rock, motivational, spoken word, sound effect or any other musical, speech or audio style.

Recommendations

It is recommended that the class-design-pattern be used for identifying genres.

 <span class="category">Blues</span>

duration

Frequency: 54% of 85 sites

The length of a audio clip is important when considering if it is worth the download.

Recommendations

The abbr-design-pattern may be a good choice for this data format. The title is always the time in seconds with the human-readable portion of it described in the CDATA.

 <abbr class="duration" title="125">2:05</abbr> seconds.

price

Frequency: 51% of 85 sites

Another strong differentiator when somebody is searching for something to purchase is the price. The price is prominently displayed on a variety of music service sites.

Recommendations

Perhaps currency-proposal would be the best method of describing this information:

<span class="money"><abbr class="currency" title="USD">$</abbr><span class="amount">7.99</span></span>

Transformational Uses

It may be desirable to process an audio blog using a transformational tool, such as XSLT, to produce a different representation that can be used elsewhere - such as in a REST invocation.

Archival Uses

Being able to scrape information from a web page and store it long term may be desirable for search companies.

Copyright

This document is in the public domain.

Related Pages

• hAudio
• hAudio cheatsheet - hAudio properties.
• hAudio authoring - learn how to add hAudio markup to your existing web pages.
• hAudio issues - issues with the specification.
  • Audio info issues - issues with the preparatory work.
• hAudio brainstorming - ideas for the specification.
• hAudio-history - the history of the research and development of hAudio.
• media-info-examples