We at Project Opushave been a hard at work securing funding and partners for an project. For those unfamiliar with XIPF, it is a Yahoo started initiaive trying to establish a packaging specification for music. XIPF has not gotten a lot of traction yet. Most of the work done to date has been ad hoc and with little focus. There has been no urgency to apply real resources to the project until now, as it is starting to become very clear that CD sales are starting their irreversible collapse.

So we have started an open project to define a packaging specification for music. We are dedicating over $500,000 to this initiaive through the support of the Government of Canada, our investors, and Simon Fraser University. Our project code name is DYLAN. We are one project within the XIPF community, but as we are focusing real resources on this project, we hope to give this effort the momentum it needs to take root.

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 of us familiar with MPEG 1, 2, or 4 which are codecs.

Why base it on a packaging format?
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 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 in another song. Portability is also simplified with a package.

We welcome everyone who wants to get involved in the project. A website home for DYLAN will be posted up on Tuesday the 6th of February. I will post details then. Anyone getting involved needs to know that this is going to be an open specification, and that we have tentatively taken the position that what we need is a packaging solution. If you think MPEG 21 or more generally packaging is the wrong approach, I strongly encourage you to start another project within XIPF, too. The more ideas tossed at this problem the better.