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; it's an XML framework for describing digital packages. We know that this may be a bit confusing for those familiar with MPEG 1, 2, or 4 which are codecs.

Why are we pursuing a packaging specification?

The goal of this project is not to simply aggregate meta-content (lyrics, videos, etc) around a song. It is to facilitate a "music experience", which involves presentation, discovery, and collaboration. We believe that to deliver an "experience" we will need a package. Certain things like interactive track listings can't be represented by a metadata record without acknowledging an internal organization of the content. Packages for one song will need to reference packages for another song. There is also ease of portability. Here's a .zip file. Done. Ingest that; no need to shuffle files, etc. That is not to say that RSS does not play a role in this project. We may in the end be developing a package of RSS feeds. Who knows.

Draft Specification

...Coming Soon