February 18, 2004
@ 06:28 AM
Comments [3]
WinFS as a Digital Media Store

Chris Sells writes

On his quest to find "non-bad WinFS scenarios" (ironically, because he was called out by another Microsoft employee -- I love it when we fight in public : ), Jeremy Mazner, Longhorn Technical Evangelist, starts with his real life use of Windows Movie Maker and trying to find music to use as a soundtrack. Let Jeremy know what you think.

I think the scenario is compelling. In fact, the only issue I have with the WinFS scenario that Jeremy outlines is that he implies that the metadata about music files Windows Media player exposes is tied to the application but in truth most of it is tied to the actual media files as regular file info [file location, date modified, etc] or as ID3 tags [album, genre, artist, etc]. This means that there doesn't even need to be explicit inter-application sharing of data.

If the file system had a notion of a music item which exposed the kind of information one sees in ID3 tags which was also exposed by the shell in standard ways then you could do lots of interesting things with music metadata without even trying hard. I also like it's quite compelling because metadata attached to music files is such a low hanging fruit that one can get immediate value out of and which exists today on the average person's machine.


 

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Wednesday, 18 February 2004 09:59:17 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
ID3 tags have become the de facto standard for metadata embedded in mp3 files. Still, it is not used in formats like wma or wav. Moreover, ID3 is technically pretty ugly. So, exposing the metadata at a more abstract level sounds like a good idea to me.

My own application, the DJ program 'Jackson' (http://jacksondj.com) relies heavily on metadata that describes the rhytmic structure of a song. Other applications should be able to access this information too. It would be great if then could do so through the file system (WinFS), rather than through some API/library (that I would have to maintain).

Of course, all this only works if we can all agree on a common schema. How Microsoft is going to handle the definition and evolution of schemas is going to be crucial for the success of this approach.
Francis Van Aeken
Wednesday, 18 February 2004 10:23:09 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Francis, right on. That's exactly my thoughts about metadata : "metadata that describes the rhytmic structure of a song". It's about what it's really made of, not the tag someone would add to a music file (which as I have said in a previous post only leads to information overload).
Stephane Rodriguez
Wednesday, 18 February 2004 10:23:54 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Francis, right on. That's exactly my thoughts about metadata : "metadata that describes the rhytmic structure of a song". It's about what it's really made of, not the tag someone would add to a music file (which as I have said in a previous post only leads to information overload).
Stephane Rodriguez
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