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. There should be aesthetic features to support the aesthetics of the music, such as artwork to communicate the mood of a recording. There should be structured information about the music, such as song titles, song versions, song discussions, etc.
More concretely our goal is to offer music consumers a digital music experience equivalent to or greater than the experience of owning an album or CD. The project name DYLAN came from Digital (Y) Liner (A) Notes. However, we envision, and hope to develop, a much broader experience than simple replication liner notes and add-ons similar to those included with the purchase of physical albums and CDs. As such, we intend to have a new name for the specification beyond XIPF or DyLaN.
We are one of many projects within the emerging XIPF community. We will be basing our work off of lessons learned in IMS packaging and quite probably closely aligned with the existing MPEG 21 specification. It's important to note that MPEG 21 is not a codec like MPEG 1, 2, or 4, it's an XML framework for describing digital packages.
DYLAN is a project sponsored by Project Opus Technologies Inc, Simon Fraser University, and the Government of Canada. The participants also acknowledge the important non-financial support of Yahoo! Music, particularly Lucas Gonze and Ian Rogers, without whom this project could not have gotten off the ground. We welcome and encourage the participation of other interested parties who share our goals. Please get involved.
We intend that this specification will result in the development of products that:
- Are a “living” package, meaning that updates to a package can be made anytime, and the user will be notified when updates occur;
- Lend themselves to unofficial (fan art, remixes, etc) content– encouraging greater artistic collaboration;
- Can be customized to individual users (region, language, etc.);
- Degrade gracefully depending on the player application;
- Can be assigned to individual users, thereby creating additional value to owning a package.
Let's do something great, and let's do it together.
David Gratton
Project Lead
