News

28/7/2003

OSTA Releases MPV Music Profile Working Draft for Comment

Music Profile for MPV Specification Enables Faster, Easier Solutions for Listening to and Interactively Browsing Digital Music Collections

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) announced today at Jupiter Plug.IN Conference and Expo 2003, a prestigious digital music conference, that it released a working draft of the Music Profile for its MPV (MusicPhotoVideo) specification focusing on enhancing the exchange and playback of digital music. OSTA representatives will be available at Jupiter Plug.IN on July 28 and 29 to discuss the Music Profile extension to the MPV specification.

MPV (MusicPhotoVideo) is an extensible, open and royalty-free standard format designed to enhance the way consumers can store, exchange and enjoy collections of music, photo and video content on PCs and consumer electronics products. The core specification has been ratified, and is supported by many of the leading PC and CE device manufacturers. Additional profiles are being developed. The Music Profile defines the formats necessary for listening to and interactively browsing digital music collections.

"Consumers today use a personal computer as the central repository for thousands of audio files but they want to enjoy the music on all their consumer electronics devices -- CD/DVD players, portable music players, car stereos and the new wireless networking receivers. There is no standard way to transfer the music between all these devices. With MPV, you can put a disc you've made with 200 or so songs into your DVD player and sort and access your songs by title, musician, or genre," said Raza Zaidi, MPV Music Initiative Lead for OSTA. "Today's media players have convenient management features including creating multiple playlists based on genre or artist similarity. However, these playlists often use proprietary formats. The MPV Music Profile defines a universal format that will result in a better music experience and improve business processes in the digital music world. People will no longer be limited to viewing information about a music clip on a PC."

MPV Improves Consumers' Digital Music Experience

Examples of ways in which MPV could improve the user experience and facilitate business processes for digital music follow:

* When consumers use an MPV-enabled disc recording application to make a compilation CD, the application will also record the MPV information (song identification, playlists and metadata) in a single file to the disc. Consumer playback devices could then quickly read that one file and determine the contents of the disc to display an easy-to-use navigation system enabling users to search or sort by genre, artist, album or song.

* The new wireless receivers in home networks that stream music from the personal computer use Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), an XML specification, to communicate. MPV, also XML-based, can work gracefully with UPnP to standardize the playback of collections and playlists from and to all devices on the home network.

* Music labels could add MPV information along with cover art, artist photos and lyrics to pre-recorded audio CDs that could be played back on consumer electronics devices. For example, when listening to an audio CD on a DVD player, the consumer could view a photo slideshow of the artist on the TV screen. The music industry often adds exciting content to Audio CDs that only plays back on PCs with added software. With MPV, it would be possible to access this content on consumer electronics devices.

* MPV could also be used by online music subscription services to track songs the user burns onto a recordable disc. The MPV information would be in the data portion of a mixed mode disc.

www.osta.org/mpv