Purpose and Structure
If you have already checked the snapshots, you noticed that every album an song is referenced by his full name. Since Winplay3 (still a 16bit program) doesn't like long file names, I needed a way to make the correspondence between the short files names and the real name. That's what descrip.ion files are for. It speeds up the time needed to calculate the albums and total playtime since it only needs to look at the "descript.ion" file and not at the files themselves. If you know 4DOS or 4NT, you certainly know that descript.ion files are used to comment a file. By a strange coincidence ;-), the structure of MP3 Passport descript.ion files is compatible with the 4DOS structure. So you will see the full name of a song or album in a single "dir" command as well... even under dos.
The MP3 Passport has two main window. A two level tree view and a detail list view (see picture).
Let's begin with the tree view window. It has two levels of hierarchy. The first one is for the composer/category (Category Index) and the second for the album title (Album Index). You cannot create more (nor less) levels. It's always possible to organize your compilations of songs according to this scheme and I find more logical to have the same amount of hierarchic levels through the whole set(s) of MP3 files.
Sample of a category level "descript.ion" file
; Descript.ion file - Category Index ; ==================================== ; ; 1 2 3 4 5 ;2345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 ;Dirname+Description ;------------------------------------------------- Army Army of Lovers BluesB Blues Brothers Coolio Coolio DStraits Dire Straits Erasure Erasure Films Movie Soundtracks ; ; The dirname and the description must be separated ; with 2 spaces and cannot exceed column 50.
Sample of an album level "descript.ion" file
; Descript.ion file - Album Index ; ================================= ; ; 1 2 3 4 5 6 ;23456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 ;Dirname+Description CD Nbr ;------------------------------------------------+---------- GGG Glory, glamour and gold 2 Luxury Massive luxury overdose 2 ; ; - The dirname and the description must be separated with ; 2 spaces and cannot exceed column 50. ; - The ASCII character 004 at column 51 separates the required ; info (displayable by 4DOS) and the optional info (hidden). ; - The CD Number (optional) is used by the search function to ; easily locate an album through a set of CD's.
The list view is used to display the detail of each album. You have of course the song number and a full-text description, but also the length of each song and the total length of the album. Those lengths are computed from the filesize and the bandwidth of the MP3 file. If you don't know what bandwidth I'm talking about, read the faq about MPEG Audio Layer 3.
Note that it's strongly recommended to have filenames like this : "NAMExx.MP3" where xx is a number between 01 and 99. You can choose different names for each song, but the "Local Random Play Mode" (see the manual) will not work since it based on the NAME prefix.
Sample of an detail level "descript.ion" file
; Descript.ion file - Detail ; ============================ ; ; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ;2345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 ;Filename+Description Size kBit/s CD Nbr ;-------------------------------------------------+----------+-------+------ GGG01.MP3 Hurrah hurrah apocalypse 5339846 128000 2 GGG02.MP3 Sexual revolution 3639588 128000 2 GGG03.MP3 Stand up for myself 3876571 128000 2 GGG04.MP3 Lit de parade (video edit) 3140545 128000 2 GGG05.MP3 Life is fantastic 3918785 128000 2 GGG06.MP3 Mr battyman 3073253 128000 2 GGG07.MP3 C'est dTmon 3434370 128000 2 GGG08.MP3 Shine like a star 3546383 128000 2 GGG09.MP3 You've come a long way baby 5873162 128000 2 GGG10.MP3 Ballrooms of Versailles 3312326 128000 2 GGG11.MP3 Dub evolution 4180845 128000 2 GGG12.MP3 Like a virgin sacrified 3919621 128000 2 GGG13.MP3 Lit de parade (radio edit) 3326955 128000 2 ; ; There are a few simples rules for formatting descriptions files : ; - The filename and the description must be separated with ; 2 spaces and cannot exceed column 50. ; - The ASCII character 004 at column 51 separates the required ; info (displayable by 4DOS) and the optional info (hidden). ; - The filesize (optional) must be within column 52-62. ; - The kBit/s (optional) must be within column 63-68. ; - The CD Number (optional) must be within column 71-76. ; ; The filesize and kBit/s fields are required by the program to ; display the playtime of each song and the CD Number is used by ; the search function to easily locate a song through a set of CD's.
I know this may seems a bit tedious at the beginning, but after all, you make the "descript.ion" files once and then you benefit from them hundred times. If you want, you can download MP3 Passport by Moebius who automatically create the "descript.ion" files. In a future release, I will include a new module that will generate descript.ion files.
MP3 Passport (C) 1996, 1997 Arcadian.
Last updated : April 16, 1997