SMIL

[Pascale Jacq]

I can't find any relevant timing tags in HTML, however I see all the
specifications (including for audio) listed for SMIL at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/
For audio in particular:
http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/extended-media-object.html#edef-audio
For timing and synchronization in particular:
http://www.w3.org/TR/smil20/smil-timing.html

This looks promising, but can see how a long process it would take to get
to a final product. If I get there I'll let you know.
Thanks Nick and Dave!
Pascale

>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