[uf-discuss] a microformat for audio track metadata

[Dr. Ernie Prabhakar]

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/