Slashdot Mirror
Music Industry Develops Centralized File-Sharing System
pearljam145 writes "A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files. Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself. The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group backed by technology companies including Microsoft, is hoping the sharing file standard will be adopted by technology companies and incorporated into software music players."
...can be downloaded right here in a zipped PDF. There's an XML Schema on the last page of the "Core Specification 1.0".
The Army reading list
From two days ago?
Check out MusicBrainz, it will fingerprint your ogg or mp3 files and compare the fingerprint against their database (all OSS btw) and send back the correct id3 tags, and save the music files into the directory structure you set up. If it can't find the files you can import missing albums in from freedb or put in albums yourself. It's gotten a lot better in the last year or so as far as the number of fingerprints it has. It's a very sweet system, I just finished tagging a collection of >100G of mp3s and oggs (from various sources) and it performed fantastically.
Right now the tagger program is only for windows, but the author just got a grant and will be working to develop linux and os/x taggers. The libraries are all OSS and there are a few (not as good) taggers written with them for other OSs.