Posted on: February 11, 2007 in Music

DYLAN launched

The new DYLAN project has been released. What is DYLAN?

“DYLAN is a project to define an OPEN specification for digital music packages. It is an independent project coming out of the XIPF initiative started by Yahoo! Music. The goal of DYLAN and XIPF is to allow music downloads to support functionality beyond just listening.”

Really, this is about providing context. This is about putting the ‘listening experience’ back into a plain old folder of mp3’s. There’s an feeling I get from looking at the spines of my vinyl record collection that is sorely missed from iTunes, and I have high hopes that this project will rectify the situation.

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2 Responses to “DYLAN launched”

  1. 1
    Paul Says:
    February 12th, 2007 at 5:16 pm

    I’ve been puzzling a bit about DYLAN. It seems to me that instead of packing all of this data with the audio, it would be better to just tag the mp3 with a song id (like a musicbrainz track id for instance). This unique song id could then be used to fetch all of the supporting metadata - that way, the metadata would always be up to date, it could be easily modified and updated. And it is much easier to ship around.

  2. 2
    David Gratton Says:
    February 12th, 2007 at 5:44 pm

    Hi Paul,

    We are not just talking metadata. We are talking for lack of a better word-meta media (Videos, album art, Coversongs, re-mixes, ringtones, avatars, etc). Both the metadata and meta-content may have internal dependencies. Take an interactive track listing as a very simple case.

    I’m going to quote D’Arcy Norman here, as I think it is well articulated on his Blog Post on our project:

    Content Packages are really a way for content producers to bundle up various bits that make up the experience of interacting with their content. The indivdual bits of content, the metadata that describes each one, the metadata that describes various paths through it, interfaces to present the content to the user, potentially code that interacts via an API to communicate with other systems and users.

    That is not to say we won’t use the song ID to fetch the package. Let me know if that helps? And please join the project we could use your input.

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