RESTful media types for audio/music collection service (with metadata)

Question

I have a large music collection, composed of mp3 files, flac files, and others. I would like to share it with devices on my local network and computers I am using on remote networks. It seems to me that HTTP is eminently well-suited to the sharing of files and I wonder if there's anything saner than uPNP (a.k.a DLNA) that my server could implement so that a suitable client could find out what's on the server and query information like track title, artist, composer, cd cover artwork, etc etc - the kind of stuff that would be stored in ID3 tags for an mp3 file.

(My experience of uPNP is limited, but I know it's SOAP-based, which makes me suspicious that it has any good in it, and I know that almost all the googling I've done on it has returned other peoples libraries rather than discussion of the protocol itself, which is another red flag)

(I know also of DAAP, the Itunes format, but that's proprietary and it would appear that Apple like to break it whenever anyone else catches up. Not so wild about that either)

Any pointers?

Edit: a bit of digging reveals that MusicBrainz have an XML format - http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/MusicBrainz_XML_Meta_Data - and XSPF could also be (used? abused? discuss) for describing tracks and collections thereof. Would be interested to see critiques of these formats for this purpose

Answer 1

You could use the Fast Advanced Playlist Generator (FAPG, http://royale.zerezo.com/fapg/) to make an XSPF playlist from your collection.

In any way you have to decide what tracks to expose to whom. A playlist without file access is not too useful. World-readable access to your collection on the other hand probably isn't either.

I don't see how uPNP or REST are related to this. So there's a chance I misunderstood your question...