Show HN: Zipped Album

[fladd]

Having read several comments in other threads about frustrations with digital music and streaming, I thought this could potentially be interesting to some of you. It's a very small attempt at bringing back an experience that we seemingly lost when going fully digital.

When I was looking around whether something like this already existed, I could only find some commercial (and discontinued) attempts, but nothing based on open standards. So I made a draft of what I think an open single-file music album format could look like. It is very simple, and basically just a specification of how to combine several already existing formats into one file. It is also compatible with the ZIP files you get when downloading a FLAC album from Bandcamp.

While some players (Foobar2000, DeaDBeeF) should already be able to play this format, I also made a cross-platform (desktop) demo player that fully supports the suggested format (including the digital booklet).

I am aware that this is not going to gain a lot of traction, but I am sharing this as it might still be useful to individuals.

[dangravell]

I appreciate the thought for the album listeners out there.

But why is this better than a single FLAC with a CUE file?

Have you thought about album-level metadata?

[fladd]

Thanks for your comment!

In principle, you could indeed - even with the current FLAC container - have a single FLAC file in combination with a cue sheet. But I wanted more than this:

1. Something that is based on what people do already (e.g when you download an album from Bandcamp, you get a Zip)

2. Proper booklet support

3. Support for lossy albums (Opus)

4. An easy way to get to the individual tracks (most OS can open Zip files without additional software)

So in the end, having everything zipped up seemed the most straight-forward approach.

Concerning album-level metadata, all information is currently only inside the Zip file. In theory metadata could be attached to the Zip (I think you can add comments at the beginning of a Zip file without breaking the format). Could you elaborate what would be the added benefit of additional metadata?