Greg - MOG

I'm realizing the core theme of most of my posts is the question "Is recorded music really music"? And I think I'm trying to make the argument that the answer is no, that music truly only exists in its live performance, and that recordings are shadowy, pseudo-musical reminders of what a performer once did on one highly controlled occasion.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it leads you into nonsense problems, like denying the presence of music in the room at the moment you are reading this.

One way out of this problem is to say that a recording isn't a method of replicating music, it's a composition for speakers.

Blogged audio is a new wrapper for an existing medium. An audioblog is a new medium.

Ryan Shaw >> Embedding Audio and Video in Text

I like the way the New York Times is embedding audio in their frontpage now. The result is a true multimedia document (combining print and audio) not just multiple documents in different media (a podcast or its transcript).

That's the tricky thing about digital albums -- a digital version of a record album is one thing, the medium that happens as a result of the digitization of record albums is another.

My prediction for 2007: it will be the year when that new medium happens.

Thanks to the Cruxy crew, there is now an XSPF player in Second Life:

If you come by our virtual pad, you'll notice a number of musician posters on the wall. Clicking on any of these will trigger a call to the old-fashioned radio in the room that is actually a XSPF music player under the covers.

What's cool is that this is an open gateway between XSPF files on the web and Second Life:

You can load *any* XSPF playlist into the player by just saying (aka typing into Second Life chat window): "xspf " or, for example: "xspf http://webjay.org/by/chromegat/theafricansoundsproject.xspf" will load a playlist from webjay.

You can jump around tracks by saying "track " and open the tracks info link by saying "info ". (We decided to make it a "voice" based interface as opposed to a visual dialog as that seemed the most Star Trek-way to do it.)

Now the only things missing are a authoring tool in Second Life, so that you can say "add song to my playlist", and the ability to embed an XSPF player anywhere in SL.

My main source of fresh, not to mention free and legal, sheet music is Mutopia. Over the Christmas break I found two new sources:

1. 

   International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).

   
   
2. 

   The American Memory collection from the Library of Congress is full of insanely obscure gems.

   
   

The NPR show This American Life is using an XSPF player on their web site when you choose the option to stream a podcast MP3 online for free.

What strikes me about this player is the way they take good advantage of the meat-and-potatoes features of XSPF: for each MP3 to be streamed, they have an image, an annotation, and a link to get more info. I am struck by this because of the way that these specific features of the format, and then of Fabricio's Flash player, and then of all XSPF players, are becoming a standard practice.

That feature set originated as a SMIL hack back in the days before XSPF existed, when the playlist hackers were still experimenting with SMIL to see if it could be made to work as a general purpose solution for playlisting. People fiddled around with features like multiple images per song and multiple audio clips per image, but SMIL players were so buggy and unpredictable that the most complicated feature set which could be implemented with any kind of reliability was very small.

The one-image-per-track feature originated with my SMIL version of the Work playlist. The info link happened in response to a blogged comment by Alf Eaton: "I'm a little worried about bandwidth costs for the people whose songs get included in these playlists (mostly epitonic.com in this one), as there's no central caching and they don't get to display their adverts"; being conscientious about supplying a link back to the host of an audio item was a way to pay them back.

I adopted the info link and image features in the SMIL produced on Webjay, added the idea of a free-text annotation on each track, and when we did XSPF I brought these three features along. When Fabricio Zuardi did the first version of Musicplayer he implemented that feature set, and then the MP3 players influenced by his player also adopted it.

At this point I suspect that a new MP3 player which didn't do XSPF would probably try to do those features anyway. Out of the whole universe of possible new metadata you might want for a multimedia file, these items have the best cost/benefit ratio. They're easy to implement in almost any context, they introduce a bare minimum of new technology, and they enable both the world of visual experience and the world of hypertext.

The This American Life coders did a good job with the technical work. They got the MIME type right -- application/xspf+xml, thank you very much -- and they made correct use of the meta element for adding extensions.

Here is sample source for one of their XSPF files:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<playlist version="1.0" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/">
  <title>Soundcheck: Matisyahu  (December 11, 2006)</title>
  <info>http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2006/12/11#segment70151</info>
  <tracklist>
    <track>
      <location>http://audio.wnyc.org/soundcheck/soundcheck121106b.mp3</location>
      <annotation>Matisyahu </annotation>
      <info>http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/2006/12/11#segment70151</info>
      <image>http://www.wnyc.org/images/flashplayer/soundcheck.jpg</image>
      <meta rel="http://www.wnyc.org/ns/xspf/dlright">false</meta>
    </track>
  </tracklist>
</playlist>

There is one error here -- the element named "tracklist" should be named "trackList".

trackList vs tracklist is really a fault in the XSPF spec, since we don't use mixedCase anywhere else. For example, we don't say "playList", we say "playlist". How that happened was that Robert Kaye supplied the mixedCase trackList example in an informal conversation about the proposed element, I copied and pasted his example into the working text of the spec, and nobody caught the discrepancy until well after the spec had been ratified and frozen. Oops.