Posted on: September 7, 2005 in Technology, Coding, Music

Micro Formats and Audio = Peanut Butter and Chocolate

Boris has an interesting post summarizing a discussion we had on micro formats and audio files. The problem is that audio found on the internet has its meta information (title, artists, album, etc..) obfuscated by the binary nature of the file. Jonathan left a comment on Boris’ post saying that it’s pretty straight forward to grab this information from the file itself. But how much easier (not to mention computationally less expensive) would it be for crawlers and bots to find audio if meta information is embedded right in the glorious page itself; no need to parse another large audio file again! I think a micro format that is a one-to-one representation of ID3 meta information will be quite useful.

I think it’s also important to point out that I’m not saying this is the only way this information should be stored and retrieved. The audio module (shameless plug) I have just released for Drupal stores all of it’s meta information in a database and will soon be query-able via a web service, but I also think it would be great if this rich meta information was available right in the XHTML.

There is some good preliminary information on the micro format wiki, and in related news Lucas Gonze has also recently been talking about a playlist micro format based on XSPF.

I think audio meta information is one of the most compelling use cases for micro formats yet, and I look forward to more discussion on this!

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3 Responses to “Micro Formats and Audio = Peanut Butter and Chocolate”

  1. 1
    Robert Douglass Says:
    September 8th, 2005 at 4:52 am

    Funny that I was just thinking the same thing. Microformats entered my radar space sometime last week and I’ve been thinking about them a lot, especially since I’m doing a project that is using Dublin Core, which could also be represented as a microformat.

    To the fore, fearless audio leader! You’re doing great things.

  2. 2
    Tantek Says:
    September 9th, 2005 at 7:33 am

    Colin,

    Thanks for your kind words regarding microformats! I encourage you to both watch the microformats wiki and join the microformats discussion list to follow the discussion. Specifically, you may want to take a look at the media-metadata-examples page and add your thoughts on representing audio meta information there. Looking forward to working with you.

    Thanks,

    Tantek

  3. 3
    Colin Brumelle Says:
    September 12th, 2005 at 10:52 am

    Robert,

    Interesting point to contrast Microformats with Dublin Core meta data. For example, MusicBrainz has a RDF/XML format that describes audio to be used in conjunction with Dublin Core. This seems like two ways of approaching a similar problem. I see the Dublin Core as very ‘Ivory Tower’, where as Microformats feel much more grass roots and decentralised. But really, both are needed…

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