Although there’s quite a bit of info on the web on audio CD preservation, most of the resources I found tend to focus on the audio ripping process. However, when you rip a CD to a bunch of audio files, it’s important that the original playing order of the tracks is recorded somewhere. Of course you can (and should!) do this at the preservation metadata level, but for access you also want to have some mechanism that allows an end user to hear the individual tracks in their original playing order (e.g. in a multimedia player application). From the top of my head I can think of 2 general approaches to achieve this:
- Record the playing order inside the audio files themselves, e.g. using “Track Number” tags that are embedded as RIFF Info or ID3 tags.
- Use a separate play list file. For this several formats exist, such as M3U and XSPF.
The main problem I see is that all of the above methods are supported by some players (and not by others), but I have have some difficulty in judging which approach would ensure the most widespread support. This made me wonder if there are any recommended best practices for this? What are other people doing?
