The Flight Album Coveer

"The Flight"

About Digital Albums built as bundled standalone app packages...

Written, Recorded, and Developed:

From concept to design to stable release
An abstract of .LPA Files by: Christopher Johnson

This began with an idea and a compulsion to delve into experimenting with creating a web app that contained simple elements but has stayed true to thenotion of using only Standards Based languages and content created or presented within HTML5 webApps strictly adhering to the usage of the standard files and code required by the latest buils of such w3c adherant coding based on stable, cross-platform code meant to work together beit online or offline.

The music for this hybrid webApp design was initially set up with only one mp3 file (as with the my first release using this code for Jason Buice's 'triptek' EP album, released as a five part single track). Playing a single file through an HTML5 audio tag element is not complicated and was done on purpose, so that the listener could experience the album as an album, which is what this app is and was originally being created to acheive. This design was chosen first so that an artist could get listeners to 'listen' more intently by giving the listener all the additional, related content to enjoy while listening to the entirety of a digital album in such a packaged container as when people bought LP vinyl records, cassette tapes and compact discs. There was and is joy in listening to music while following along with the lyrics contained in The sleeve, j-card or booklet that came with these music albums. There was a standard to meet with the lyrics, liner notes, credits and of course the artwork of not just a cover but, within the expectations for the design of the products' packaging as well as the quality of the music and their performances.

To serve the purpose of creating a Standards Based stand-alone digital bundle package with an elegant approach to logically designing a self contained, fluid UI and a base set of functionalities to present all the embedded content, including album cover, track listing, liner notes, bio, photos, social and web links, etc... this is where the idea came for the LPA file type Named for the classic long play album vinyl records.

LPA are little Bundles of joy... But are the Apps?

If we can agree that packaged webapps are at first an acceptable crossplatform container for the LPA file bundle, the next question is can it or should it be a stand alone file type with built in player to play the embedded content?

In the spirit of FOSS, for accesibility by Timmy the bedroom hobby-ist musician as well as by artists, the likes of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Roger waters and David Gilmore, the LPA format has the goal of being widely used and hopefully can standardized a release format by presenting a platform to develop the .lpa file type for eventual mime-type recognition.

The current state of things seemes to make it clear that mp3 is the most compatible choice to start from. MP3 uses the power of embedded content in the ID3 Tags. Taken a step further and especially when filled out in fullness the mp3 id3/4 tag content will make the .LPA file type make you want to sing...

Along other ideas, so long as the content is represented by a fully navigatable, fully accessible by controls, music album, the .lpa file standards will meet minimum requirements of acceptability for licensed release.

Instead of using MP3 files in M3U8 playlist or HLS streaming, convert The MP3 files to MP4 and use M3U8 to host the Mp4 audio files(encoded as audio only). Use of the poster attribute to display the album cover will be considered. Adding timed captioning of lyrics would be an accessibility dream come true as well.

At this point, or at least at the time of this writing, the aim is to stick firmly to strict W3C standards and guidelines and remain completely open source and cross-platform compatible. ThaT said, the design will follow a path as such:

  1. An XML file markup structure will be defined by an XSD, initially built as an internal definition until such time as it is able to be remotely hosted on a host domain capable of serving the potential traffic using the XSD doctype definition.
  2. The next step includes moving the 'Tracks Listing' section into the newly defined XML structured playlist that will be written as XML content but also by including the inline embedded internal XML Schema, NameSpace and inline XSD defined in just preceeding XSD data which will then be readable by HTML through a JavaScript XML parser script.
  3. But the XML will be reused as UI content that is styled as needed by CSS while still remaining readable by the audio element embedded into the code of thia HTML5.
  4. The question arises also of whether to use the information contained within the properly encoded mp4 audio files by getting the tag content from embedded meta-data... -TBD;
  5. Additional album content such as the artwork can also be pulled from the meta tags in the audio tracks.

View the source code of this webpage/webapp to learn more about the code through the actual code which will contain comments throughout the code of this document, written with html5, js/es5-6 and css3+. Visit SCDN. SPEKTRUMCreations.com For info about join the development team being assembled to build this file type and other projects that will follow...





This is an experiment in creating a web app that contains only Standards Based content created in HTML5 using only native javascript and CSS.

The music for this hybrid webApp design was initially set up with only one mp3 file Playing through an HTML5 audio tag element, which was on purpose so that the listener could experience the album as an album, which is what this app is being created as.

To serve the purpose of creating a Standards Based stand-alone bundle with an elegant approach to logically designing a self contained, fluid UI and a base set of functionalities to present all the embedded content, including album cover, track listing, liner notes, bio, photos, social and web links, etc... this is where the idea came for the LPA file type Named for the classic long play album vinyl records.

If we can agree that webpacked webapps are at first an acceptable crossplatform container for the LPA file bundle, the next question is can it or should it be a stand alone file type with built in player to play the embedded content?

In the spirit of FOSS, for accesibility by Timmy the bedroom hobby-ist musician as well as by artists, the likes of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the LPA format has the goal of being widely used and hopefully can standardized a release format by presenting a platform to develop the .lpa file type for eventual mime-type recognition.

The current state of things seemes to make it clear that mp3 is the most compatible choice to start from. MP3 uses the power of embedded content in the ID3 Tags. Taken a step further and especially when filled out in fullness the mp3 id3/4 tag content will make the .LPA file type make you want to sing...

Along other ideas, so long as the content is represented by a fully navigatable, fully accessible by controls, music album, the .lpa file standards will meet minimum requirements of acceptability for licensed release.

Instead of using MP3 files in M3U8 playlist or HLS streaming, convert The MP3 files to MP4 and use M3U8 to host the Mp4 audio files(). Use the poster attribute to display the album cover. Adding timed captioning of lyrics would be an accessibility dream come true.

At this point, or at least at the time of this writing, the aim is now to stick firmly to strict W3C standards and guidelines and remain completely open source. that's said, The design will follow as such:

  1. The XML file markup structure will be defined by an XSD, initially built as an internal definition, which has begun in the exprimental development branch for this software using SPKML as the initial start point as the language instead of HTML.
  2. SPKML is an acronym for "Semantic Programming & Knowledge Machine Language". In the book "<CodrBase />" written by Christopher (Chris) Johnson, it stood initially for "Special Purpose Knowledge Markup Language"
  3. Turn the 'Tracks Listing' section into an .XSPF style XML playlist that is written as XML file content but including the inline embedded internal XML Schema, NameSpace and inline XSD defined in just preceeding XSD data which will then be readable by HTML through a JavaScript XML parser script.
  4. But the XML will be reused as UI content that is styled as needed by CSS while still remaining readable by the audio element embedded into the code of thia HTML5.
  5. The question arises also of whether to use the information contained within the properly encoded mp4 audio files by getting the tag content from embedded meta-data... -TBD;
  6. Additional album content such as the artwork can also be pulled from the meta tags in the audio tracks. It will also soon include chapter markers in a single audio track that allows the listener to change the 'track' of the album...

View the source code of this webpage/webapp to learn more about the code through the actual code which has comments throughout this document written with html5, js/es5-6 and css3+