Could someone explain what this does in layman's terms?

[zwhitchcox]

I've read the docs and that article twice, but I still don't really understand what this does and how it does it. I get the fact that it somehow adds information about the file and the path to the stream, but that's about everything I know, and it seems like it does more than that

[yocontra]

It describes an object containing metadata about files. The properties and description of what it does are in the README. It's kind of like a spec, so any tools that say they work with "vinyl" will work together because they all talk about files the same way.