hAudio: Describing Audio with Microformats

February 20, 2008 in Microformats by Carsten Pötter | Comments

Much to my surprise there is a microformat available which is describing audio content: hAudio. I haven’t been aware of this microformat yet.

hAudio provides a lot of properties to describe meta data of a track, album, podcast, top whatever lists, and basically all other examples of audio recordings. It also makes use of other microformats like hCard (describing a contributor, e.g. the artist or composer) and rel-enclosure (indicating a stream or downloadable file), and therefore is also a good example of using existing microformats to create new ones. That’s actually part of the beauty of microformats.
People using the Operator add-on for Firefox can download a script which enables Operator to detect hAudio.

Users who are familiar with the quite popular MP3 tagging format ID3 will notice that hAudio is not as detailed as that format at first look, e.g. in hAudio artist, publisher, and soloist would all be described as contributor. However it is possible to assign hCards and role attributes to the contributor, making hAudio more flexible. Though keep in mind that one format cannot replace the other one. ID3 tags are data containers within an audio file, while hAudio is describing that file in (X)HTML.

hAudio is a very interesting microformat, though I don’t know where it is used already. Anyone know some examples?

[via notizBlog]

Tags: Artist, composer, HTML, mp3

  • ...and I dindn't mention the Operator Script, thanks for the tip :)
  • Does the Operator script work for you on a page like, say, grabb.it? Some weeks ago I had to go to great lengths to make it work, I even had to install a specially patched version of Operator in the process. I do not want to fiddle with patched extensions here, so ... the userscript is not working :-( Any hints?
  • For me it works perfect. I use the newest version of operator (without tweaks) and the ESW W3 Wiki, the hAudio script you get on Kaply's site is too old.
  • @Pfefferle: Hi, I just looked up what version of Operator I'm using: 0.9b. Maybe this is too new/beta? As for hAudio, I'm using the script Carsten linked to. I created my own hAudio demo page, but maybe I got sth. wrong. Can you please point me to a page where hAudio is recognized by your setup?
  • @Pfefferle: Ok, nevermind, it works now. Seems I already installed the versions offered at http://wiki.digitalbazaar.com/en/Firefox_Operat... some weeks ago when I couldn't wait any longer ;O) Now I reinstalled the "official" Operator plugin 0.8, and everything works like a charm!
  • @Matthias: Normaly I also try to use the newest beta, I don't why I missed it this time... my luck :)
  • Carsten Pötter
    I have to confess: I haven't installed the hAudio Operator script yet, simply because I don't know any in the wild examples of hAudio.
  • "I have to confess: I haven’t installed the hAudio Operator script yet, simply because I don’t know any in the wild examples of hAudio."

    Hello Carsten here are some pages with hAudio in the wild

    http://weborganics.co.uk/haudio-rss/

    http://darkstarserver.co.uk/

    or any of 1485 users at http://grabb.it/users/


    Thanks for the post :)
  • Not to forget my latest blog post: http://www.numblog.de/archives/529-Aaron-Jerome...

    Since I'm running a music blog, I plan to use hAudio more often. But it's a lot of work to manually markup parts of the entry body. Currently I'm thinking about a hAudio creator that generates something like an info box that I can include in my posts. But I think hAudio is only really useful if you fetch existing data from a DB; or from services like MusicBrainz, discogs.com, or last.fm which gives me some more ideas ... ;O) (of course, podcasts are a different use case)
  • Carsten Pötter
    Thanks a lot for providing those examples, Martin. Will have a look at them (and probably install the hAudio Operator script). :)
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