[LAD] Announcing: ecaedl.pl Edit Decision List Capable Audio Playing

[Robin Gareus]

drew Roberts wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 May 2010 12:10:26 you wrote:
>> drew Roberts wrote:
>>> I have been looking for an EDL capable audio player for a while now but
>>> have not found one.
>> I don't think there's an open-source audio player that does.
>> Mplayer has support for EDL but is using it's own homebrew EDL format;
>>
>> May I ask what you are trying to accomplish?
> 
> Sure. and the answer will make much of the complexity below go away for my use 
> case.
> 
> I listen to some podcasts that I think it would be useful for some other folks 
> to listen to as well but people being people, and these people being busy to 
> boot, they never seem to get around to listening.
> 
> Most of the podcasts are about an hour long.
> 
> What I want to do is listen to the podcasts, mark up an edl to pull out the 
> parts I think might be most interesting to them and also encourage them to 
> listen to the whole thing.

I guess the easiest would be to just use http://soundcloud.com/
You can add comments on the time-line, tag regions and easily share.
see http://soundcloud.com/search?q[fulltext]=podcast for an example.

OTOH, this is not a solution worthy of being mentioned on LAD.

> I would like to give them a link to the podcast and the edl file and let them 
> play the audiofile controlled by the edl.

You'll want to use SMIL for that: http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

As for creating the SMIL-EDL; that'll be the biggest problem..
Making a SMIL template is a one-time job, but finding a good
audio-player to generate your in/out timecode is an issue. I don't know
if there's a dedicated app for that. Maybe audacity or ardour's
cue-files files can be used as a basis.

I'm pretty sure there'll be a few projects in the not too distant
futures doing this with webm + HTML5.

> So, for what I want, the audio playback does not need to be gapless and nor 
> does it need to be accurate to less than a few seconds.
> 
> Naturally I can see the usefulness of those abilities for other uses.
>>> So I hacked together ecaedl.pl which work but is very rough.
>>>
>>> More info here:
>>>
>>> http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2010/05/edl-edit-decision-list-audio-player.h
>>> tml
>> thanks for sharing.
>>
>>> pastebin link here:
>>>
>>> http://pastebin.com/esXJwv84
>> A while ago I went down a very similar road:
>> http://rg42.org/gitweb/?p=sodankyla.git;a=blob;f=scripts/vsession.pl
>> parses EDL (CMX, CMX3600, Final-Cut-Pro format and 3.0.0) into a sqlite
>> database; which can then be used to generate fi. an ardour session.
> 
> One thing I want to play with is if I can make the edl files with the 
> graphical version of mplayer where I can more easily use the transport 
> control so that I can make the edl files on the first listening pass and cut 
> down on my time investment. Perhaps it would be better for me to make the edl 
> file by hand while listening in another player.
>> The workflow there is offline; meaning there's no real-time playback of
>> the actual EDL.
>> I got a few [filmsound] projects done using these scripts to generate an
>> initial ardour-session where the original sound is synced according to
>> EDL provided by the film (not video) editor, but I did not have the time
>> to go back and clean up the software [yet].
>>
>>> Right now this needs ecaplay from ecasound and perl. mplayer is useful to
>>> create the edl files but they can be created by hand.
>>>
>>> Would any cross playform audio player group be willing to add edl playing
>>> (and creating) functionality to their player? It would make things much
>>> simpler.
>> It's not as easy as it may sound. You'll need to be able to perform
>> reliable sample-accurate seeking over multiple files and play them back
>> without gap.
> 
> As you can see from my particular use case, I anticipate only one audiofile 
> ever. (I can see that for other uses I might want to work with multiple audio 
> files, but not this one.)
>> If you want to support encoded formats (such as mp3) this can become
>> non-trivial very quickly; it can get even worse if the files mentioned
>> in the EDL have different sample-rates (that's very unusual, but hey)
>>
>> I hazard a guess those are basically the reasons why mplayer does not
>> support EDL for audio. mplayer's playlist & video-EDL feature allows you
>> to mix all kind of codecs/formats: seeking to video-frames (with
>> video-frame accuracy is easier).
>>
>> ciao,
>> robin
> 
> Thanks for the discussion and input.
>>> (I guess I really need to add in a GPL license section to the file...
>>> soonest.
>>>
>>> all the best,
>>>
>>> drew
> 
> drew
>