As it stands, network audio tuning -- locating audio files and streams
-- is ineffcient. Most network audio portal sites require the user to
locate audio files and streams using a web browser and then to play the
files/streams with an audio player. Sites that support audio hardware
(ex., www.kerbango.com, www.penguinaudio.com) collect audio URLs and
format them for the hardware being supported. This hardware then accesses
audio conent by querying the web site.
The problems, as I see them are:
1) On the desktop, accessing audio via WWW/HTML adds an
unnecessary step and application launch (the WWW browser) to the process
of accessing audio.
2) The non-uniform method of presenting audio content makes it
difficult for special-purpose audio hardware/software to find and access
it.
3) Audio hardware traditionally has a small user interface (eg., a
radio, walkman, car stereo etc.) that could not support WWW browsing.
This is reasonable since the devices is intendend to deliver aural, not
visual content. This makes WWW-based tuning clumsy and inefficient.
[Centralized solutions to problem 2 (i.e., web sites such as
www.kerbango.com) are suboptimal in that they require new audio content
providers to submit their URL to (or have it found by) the hardware
company. Contrast this with the WWW where only the end user needs to know
the URL to access a web page.]
To solve these problems, I am working on NATL, the Network Audio Tuning
Language. It is an XML document type that describes network audio
content. It is intended to be the basis of a worl-wide-web of audio
content.
I would like to hear comments and critcism from this community about NATL
and your thoughts on integrating NATL browsing into Freeamp. I'd be very
interested in doing the programming on the Linux/UNIX side, but have no
experience with the other platforms.
You can find more information on NATL at
http://www.chaos.umd.edu/~dsweet/NATL including the DTD, sample NATL
scenarios, and software. A description of an NATL file is included below.
Thanks for reading.
David Sweet
An NATL document consists of a list of audio files/streams to play, meta
information about the collection of audio files/streams, and links to
other NATL pages. A future version of the NATL DTD will include a
mechanism for identifying the user for the purpose of delivering
customized content.
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