Second Draft of Free Music Player Specifications ready

[Jeff Mitchell]

Hello,

The second draft of the Free Music Player Specifications is ready. A few
words before the link.

First, for those new to the discussion, an archive of previous emails in
the discussion can be found at

http://groups.google.com/group/fmps/topics

The group is read-only, and per agreement with those involved (that
replied) further discussion will take place on xdg at lists.freedesktop.org

I want to thank Milosz Derezynski and Peter van Hardenberg, who replied
to the first draft with suggestions.

Now, some comments about this second draft.

It was suggested that instead of both integer and float values, one or
the other should be picked. It made sense to have floats in all but one
instance (user playcounts), so floats is what I went with. Overall this
decreases the spec's complexity a good amount.

I attempted to clarify things where confusion seemed to exist in
replies; for instance, Milosz's suggestion that it be encouraged that
applications should treat values as they are whenever possible, even if
in some cases they need to round them to display them to the user (for
instance, in a graphical fashion).

I cleaned up the filesystem directive section at Peter's request; it's
indeed simpler (and probably quicker) to just check each directory for a
fmps_ignore file than to check it for text values inside that file and
react appropriately.

I looked at Performer Roles on the MusicBrainz site at Milosz's request,
and decided to keep them in the spec for now. The main reason is that
while MusicBrainz supports MP3 and VorbisComments formats, it has no
capability to support performer roles for WMA or MP4 formats, whereas
there is no reason why support for these formats could not be included
in this specification. Another reason is that the FMPS spec defines
using comments (TXXX for MP3) which eases processing as TXXX is easily
supported by almost any tagging library. By contrast, for MP3 at least,
parsing the TMCL list can be difficult.


That all said, here's the second draft of the spec:

http://gitorious.org/~jefferai/xdg-specs/jefferais-xdg-specs/blobs/mediaspecs/specifications/FMPSpecs/specification.txt

--Jeff

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