The filesystem that Be created was nothing short of amazing in the 1990s. Even with the gradual evolution of other operating systems having progressed since then, it is still one of the most powerful around. Attributes are a powerful tool which allow you to store data about a file without being part of the file. This kind of power is easily put to use with audio files, such as FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and the ubiquitous MP3. By attaching attributes to audio files, you can search for them with a query. Queries also leverage the filesystem's power. As long as the attribute you are querying for is indexed in the filesystem, there is no place a file with that attribute can hide. To top it all off, they are also a fast way of search for files meeting a certain criteria.

Although both attributes and queries are very powerful, use good sense. It takes quite a while to read a large number of attributes from a file, so you may wish to cache them if you are writing a program which will need to read more than just a few of them. Queries can only make use of attributes which are indexed, and their speed goes down as more and more attributes are indexed.