Sebastian Pipping sent me an email recently pointing out a small error in our XSPF implementation, which wasn't a visible problem because I was only feeding the XSPF files to our flash audio player, but he also suggested we make the XSPF playlist files publicly visible.
Sebastian argued:
If the XSPF on Magnatune.com was valid then me and other
people could listen to your music with the player
of their choice even with the browser closed.
But my personal interest in this mainly is of a different
nature. If Magnatune and others keep producing invalid XSPF
then users will ask for software dealing with invalid XSPF
which will kill XSPF as an Open Standard and repeat the same
shame that happened to HTML in the past. The web still
suffers from that. So you have a big responsibility here.
I have seen many kinds of invalid XSPF out there already
so it really is important that you all do your part.
Musicmobs have fixed their XSPF on my request by the way.
If I understood you right at the moment Magnatune is only
using XSPF because Musicplayer wants that as input.
Why don't you put XSPF on your flag instead? "We are not evil"
and "We support open standards" fits together quite well.
Jamendo has done this before and it fits great. We will
have a "valid XSPF" button soon and I hope Magnatune will
be ready then to show it.
I agree with him, and Magnatune now fully supports the XSPF standard, which a very large number of software programs can play. XSPF is nice, because it allows the player to show album art, and a "click for more info" URL, among other things.
On album pages such as this one http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/belief-eponyms/ you'll see "Play all tracks as an m3u audio stream (or xspf)". This XSPF option also appears on the podcast and mood pages.
It would be great if you could even go one step further and fill in all the tracks' details in the corresponding tags (i.e. title, duration, album, creator). The difference e.g. in Amarok would be between http://ewsoftware.de/temp/xpf1.png (this is how XSPF and m3u files look like in Amarok; meta information is filled in only when tracks are played) and http://ewsoftware.de/temp/xpf2.png (this is how an adapted XSPF file would present itself in Amarok).
Posted by: Eckhart | February 21, 2007 at 04:33 PM
Unfortunately, the XSPF links provided on album pages don't work for me. As the files themselves are correct, the most likely cause is that they are delivered bearing a wrong mime type text/plain; it should be application/xspf+xml, as is explained in http://www.xspf.org/quickstart/:
"The MIME type for XSPF documents is application/xspf+xml. It is NOT text/plain, audio/xspf, or text/xml. THIS IS IMPORTANT."
I'd appreciate greatly if open standards support on Magnatune could be pushed this little yet decisive step further.
Posted by: Hagen | May 19, 2007 at 07:27 AM