The technical pipeline of how our engine ingests, cleans, and validates metadata for streaming platform submission — from raw payload to certified delivery, in under 0.3 seconds.
Metadata is received via API (JSON), file upload (DDEX XML, CSV, XLSX), or direct integration with a distributor's pipeline. Every payload is immediately hashed (SHA-256) and stored in immutable, encrypted storage. The original file is never modified — all subsequent processing operates on an in-memory copy.
The ingestion parser converts the incoming format into our internal canonical schema — a standardized JSON structure that represents metadata in a format-agnostic way. This normalization step ensures that regardless of how metadata arrives, it's processed identically downstream. Character encoding is normalized to UTF-8, whitespace is trimmed, and empty fields are flagged.
The core engine validates every field against published rules organized by target store specification. Each field is checked for type, format, length, character encoding, and store-specific requirements. Validations run in parallel across all target stores — a release destined for 6 stores is validated against all 6 simultaneously, not sequentially.
The engine cross-references identifiers against external registries — MusicBrainz for recording data, ISRC registries for code validity, and store-specific taxonomies for genre mapping. This enrichment step catches mismatches that field-level validation alone cannot detect: an ISRC that's structurally valid but assigned to a different recording, or a genre tag that maps to the wrong browse category.
Validation results are compiled into a field-by-field compliance report. Each issue includes the field name, the store that flagged it, the severity (error or warning), the rule that was violated, and a suggested fix. The report is structured as JSON for API consumers and rendered as a PDF for human review. Every result is timestamped and bound to the original payload hash.
If validation passes (or passes with warnings), a compliance certificate is generated with a SHA-256 hash binding the metadata payload to its validation result. The certificate is stored immutably for 7 years. The validated metadata and certificate are then ready for delivery to the target stores via the distributor's standard delivery pipeline — or via our API for automated delivery.
Run your metadata through the full pipeline and get a field-by-field compliance report in under a second.