30 Jan
2006
30 Jan
'06
10:02 a.m.
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 11:13 +0000, cdr wrote:
i know design by committee can be horrible but these
situations usually utilize vastly similar yet incompatible formats, so its sort of biting
off something small, i hope.. :)
(1) Peak Files
some of my favorite wav files have 10 metafiles each. peaks generated for peak, spark,
wavelab, soundforge, cubase, ableton live, samplitude, rezound, sweep, ardour, plus a dir
for "Apple Loops" data etc.
it would be great if each time an audio file enters a new app, the user wasnt greeted
with a 30 second burst of disk activity as peak files were generated yet again..what
exactly is needed? here are some thoughts
- average amplitude per time-slice to generate the waveform overview
* what granularity is useful? peak files seem to run a few % of filesize..
- spectral centroid for comparisonics/freesound style colorization
- annotations (OPML etc)
- timing (tempo, cue points, beat markers)
rather than invent some new arbitrary plaintext (or XML) format, i'm interested in
using OSC (as described at
http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/OSC-spec-examples.html ) to encapsulate
this data, at which point this is simply an exercise in selecting a schema/namespace...
beside faster load-times (eg one could pregenerate this data before a performance or
composition session via a recursive shell command and 'sox'), a commonly
understood format would enable easier sharing of CC-licensed material among a variety of
users and apps without useful metadata being 'lost in translation'. additionally
web and other interfaces could be developed using the metadata hints (see archive.org,
NI's KORE)
i think that this is a rather mistaken goal.
peak files and metadata are not equivalent except in the broadest sense.
annotations, timing information are all totally different beasts from
peak files. freq domain data is similar, for the most important reason:
there is no single format that will work well. ardour's current kludge
(a single peak file resolution) is likely to vanish at some point, to be
replaced by multiple peak files at different resolutions. spectral data
is the same thing: you need to know the window size at the very least,
and this can vary depending on what the user is doing.
note also that comparisonics is still covered by a patent that i expect
would be vigorously defended.
--p