XML Shareable Playlist Format (XSPF), pronounced ''spiff'', is an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

-based

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player, either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs that can be played once or in a loop. ...

format for

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

, sponsored by the Xiph.Org Foundation. XSPF is a file format for sharing the kind of

that can be played on a personal computer or portable device. In the same way that any user on any computer can open any Web page, XSPF is intended to provide portability for playlists.

Content resolution

Traditionally playlists have been composed of file paths that pointed to individual titles. This allowed a playlist to be played locally on one machine or shared if the listed file paths were URLs accessible to more than one machine (e.g., on the Web). XSPF's meta-data rich open format has permitted a new kind of playlist sharing called ''content resolution''. A simple form of content resolution is the localisation of a playlist based on

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

. An XSPF-compliant content resolver will open XSPF playlists and search a catalog for every title with <creator>, <album> and <title> tags, then localise the playlist to reference the available matching tracks. A catalog may reference a collection of media files on a local disk, a music subscription service like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, or some other searchable archive. The end result is shareable playlists that are not tied to a specific collection or service.

Example of an XSPF 1.0 playlist

Windows Path file://C:\music\foo.mp3 Linux Path file:///media/music/foo.mp3 Relative Path music/foo.mp3 External Example http://www.example.com/music/bar.ogg

History

XSPF was created by an ''ad hoc'' working group that commenced activities in February 2004, achieved rough consensus on version 0 in April 2004, worked on implementations and fine tuning throughout summer and fall 2004, and declared the tuned version to be version 1 in January 2005. XSPF is not a recommendation of any standards body besides the Xiph.Org Foundation.

Features

* A playlist format like M3U or ASX *

MIME A mime artist, or simply mime (from Greek language, Greek , , "imitator, actor"), is a person who uses ''mime'' (also called ''pantomime'' outside of Britain), the acting out of a story through body motions without the use of speech, as a the ...

content-type of application/xspf+xml * Patent-free (no patents by the primary authors) * Specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license * XML, like

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

support *

Cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

support

Software and web playlist converters

* Amarok * Foobar2000 (with appropriate plugin) * Audacious * Banshee * Clementine * Tomahawk * VLC media player (stand-alone player, available on every major platform) * XMMS2 (has a plugin to parse XSPF) * Last.fm (export of playlists and personal tag radios in XSPF) * Soundiiz (playlist converter for several streaming sites) * youtube-dl (downloader)

References

External links

*
Online XSPF Validator

XSPF Version 1 specification
{{DEFAULTSORT:Xml Shareable Playlist Format Open formats Playlist file formats Playlist markup languages Xiph.Org projects XML-based standards