Networking World: Obsessed with music, Outlook list

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: GIBBS & BRADNER
10/25/05

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Backspin columnist Mark Gibbs on his current obsessions:
digitized music tags and Outlook distribution lists.
* Links related to Gibbs & Bradner
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Obsessed with music, Outlook list

By Mark Gibbs

Editor's Note: On Nov. 8, the Gibbs and Bradner newsletter will
become Gibbs' Backspin. The newsletter will feature all of Mark
Gibbs' musings of the week, including highlights of his newest
Gearhead and Backspin columns, along with links to the latest
postings to his Gibbsblog. You will continue to be able to read
Scott Bradner's 'Net Insider column each week at the 'Net
Insider page
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/bradner.html> . We hope
you'll enjoy the new format.

This week we take a break from our current VoIP obsession and
instead focus on some of our other obsessions.

Music, for example. We have a large collection of digitized
music and we'd like to preserve the context of an album's
context. It's irritating to listen to an album we've ripped
where the tracks on the original flowed from one to the next and
the player pauses between each track because they were ripped
into separate files.

Of course you could rip the album to a single file but then you
would not be able to easily find the start of any particular
track. In short, your choices are imperfect playback or
unmanageable content.

If you, like us, have theorized about a standard to fix this,
theorize no longer. A group called ID3 is working on a proposal
to add table of contents and chapter data to any file that uses
the ID3 tag.

The ID3 tag is a data structure that is commonly used in a
number of audio file formats, including MP3, AAC, WMA and Ogg
Vorbis, and stores meta-information such as artist, album and
release date. The entire ID3 tagging scheme is a de facto
standard and can be applied to any file, although its use
outside of audio is rare.

ID3 tags are prepended as the file's header and the reason they
don't interfere with the original contents is any code that
parses data is supposed to ignore data structures it doesn't
understand.

ID3 Version 1 was limited in the amount of data it could store
(all data fields were of a fixed length and totaled 128 bytes),
but Version 2 tags are, in comparison, huge (as large as 256M
bytes). Version 2 tags consist of a series of chunks of data
called frames (in common with MP3 data structures), and each
frame can be as much as 16M bytes in size.

There are no restrictions on what kind of data can be stored in
ID3 Version 2 frames so anything from raw text (Unicode is
supported) to images and even program code can be embedded.
There is even support for synchronized lyrics and audio
encryption.

Anyway, what got us excited was the proposal for table of
contents and chapter frames . In this scheme chapter frames
define the start and end of a chapter in the content as well as
an optional title, related URLs and so on. Table of content
frames can list either "child" tables of content (which allows
for hierarchical structures) or chapters. There also is a field
to indicate whether the listed chapters are ordered, that is, to
be treated as sequential and continuous.

Obsession No. 2 is actually a question: In Outlook 2003 we had a
distribution list that was imported from another copy of
Outlook. The problem is internal data architecture issues mean
when you move a list from one machine to another you lose the
individual list entries. And when you use these corrupted
entries you get the terribly useful message "An unexpected error
has occurred." You have to delete the offending distribution
lists and recreate them.

But if you use the same name for the new distribution list the
automatic name-checking feature will find the old distribution
list details from some internal cache. This list in fact points
to nothing so if you accept the entry and then try to send your
message you'll get that unexpected error.

To get around this you have to go to the address book to use the
new version of the distribution list. After that it seems the
old version of the list is purged from this mysterious cache and
automatic name completion will provide the new distribution
list. Of course, there's a catch. When you restart Outlook the
old cache appears to be reinstated.

So, our question is how do you either purge the old cached
contents used by the automatic name-completion feature or force
the updated cache contents to be flushed to disk to be used by
automatic name completion when Outlook next starts?

The top 5: Today's most-read stories

1. Cisco talking IP-radio nets
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibrad9541>
2. School traps infected PCs in its web
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibrad9526>
3. Cartoon of the Week
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibrad9527>
4. Juniper gains corporate network ground
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibrad9542>
5. Cisco finally brings security push to LAN
<http://www.networkworld.com/nlgibrad9051>

_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Mark Gibbs

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist
and he writes the weekly Backspin
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/gibbs.html> and Gearhead
<http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/gearhead.html> columns
in Network World, as well as the Gearblog blog
<http://www.networkworld.com/weblogs/gearblog/> . We'll spare
you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go to
<http://www.gibbs.com/mgbio>. Contact him at
<mailto:webapps@gibbs.com>
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This newsletter sponsored by Xerox
Learn About Smarter Document Management in the Office

Gibbs archive: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/gibbs.html
Bradner archive:
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/bradner.html
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Networking World

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Obsessed with music, Outlook list

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