audio timecode access

[Nicholas Thieberger]

Pascale,

You are right that conversion of audio files to mp3 doesn't solve the
problem, that was just a suggestion for saving space, and so making
it easier to have all the data on one hard disk.

The question of accessing timed points within a large media file is
central to all of our work and needs to be addressed by anyone
wanting to link to media. I suggested a streaming server as one way
of dealing with this. There are others, and my thesis used quicktime
in a purpose-built application called Audiamus to links in this way.
For a dictionary, we need to have a way of instantiating the links
from whatever software we have the dictionary in. If you can convert
the dictionary into html and maintain the timecodes, then you can
have the audio data sitting on a streaming server and just those bits
of it you want at any given link being called by clicking on the
link. A streaming server allows you  to access just timecoded parts
of the media file. This implies that you want it all to be accessible
to people via a web interface, but does not imply that this data is
freely available to anyone, as access is only given via your
dictionary interface. To the user, the interface is the web  page and
they get to hear the sound.

To do this locally (that is, not on the web), you need to be able to
call points in the media file. And, as Dave Nathan said, there may be
ways of doing this with SMIL.

I don't think the answer is to segment the media files, but we all
need to find a solution that works easily. Any other suggestions
anyone?

nick

At 9:29 AM +1000 17/8/04, Pascale Jacq wrote:
>Thank you to all who have given advice and links and comments etc.
>to my queries posted last week. I've been chasing up all the papers
>on line and trying to get a grasp on the implications each path
>taken would hold.
>
>I still find it unclear how MP3 conversion (which to me seems to be
>a way of reducing the size of a file without affecting quality/time
>codes etc., nothing more) or audio streaming (which seems to make a
>single large file of all data to enable searching etc.) actually
>solve the issue of how to locate a few seconds of material within
>one audio file (whatever format).
>Is it possible at all? Does it require some small program to be
>written? Or is the only real answer to segment/extract each of those
>small seconds of material for document linking purposes?
>
>I'd love to get a clear answer to this question (which I perhaps
>didn't phrase succinctly in the first place) and then hopefully I
>can stop bugging you all! : )
>
>Cheers,
>Pascale

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