Vorbis Comment Like Text

Vorbis Comment Like Text (short: VCLT) is a playlist format mainly used by the RoarAudio PlayList Daemon? (rpld). It can store a playlist of multiple local and remote files and streams. It contrast to most other playlist formats (like m3u or xspf) it supports storing a large range of meta data.

The file format

The file format is a plain text file. Each line corresponds to a meta date or a separator. Lines are ended by new-line ('\n', 0x0A). All lines including the very last one must be terminated this way. the character carriage return ('\r', 0x0D) is not allowed anywhere within the file. The encoding is UTF-8. Playlist entries are separated by a single line containing only two '='. There must be no empty lines. All lines not an entry separator nor a meta date are invalid. However the reader should ignore empty lines. In case it finds any other invalid line it should ask the user if it should continue importing the data.

Each meta date is a line containing a key followed by '=' and an value, ended by the line terminator (see above). The key is a case insensitive string. Allowed characters for the key are ASCII 0x20 through 0x7D, 0x3D ('=') excluded as well as 0x41 through 0x5A inclusive. See the VorbisComment? specification for details. The value may contain all characters in Unicode space but the ASCII values 0x00 through 0x1F inclusive, exclusive 0x09 (tab). The later limitation is done to avoid problems with reading applications considering those characters control characters.

Possible keys

All keys as specified in the official VorbisComment? specification are valid. User defined keys are also considered valid as long as they do not conflict with the official key names as published in the VorbisComment? specification nor any other keys defined in this document.

The following keys are specific to this playlist format and may be used in other contexts (for example Tantalos) as well.

Key	Description	Example
STREAMURL
FILENAME
FILEURL
LENGTH
HASH
SIGNALINFO, AUDIOINFO
OFFSET

Notes

This specification should be aligned with the VorbisComment? specification as published by the Xiph Foundation. Any conflict is unintentional.