Proposal Structured Audio

Proposed Feature
It's a standard for marking up audio or video streams for structured playback. Most likely we want the full flexibility of an existing scripting language, so the delivery format will often be a zip consisting of javascript and the stream, with the stream containing standard tags. There will be alternative delivery formats too. I chose this one as a first target as it is suitable with slight adaptation for web embedding. Initially the whole thing will be darned clunky. To make it smooth we will need to:


 * Make structured playback editing tools (for simple scenarios) within Audacity.
 * Publish the standard so that other apps start using it and shaping it.
 * Integrate with open source closed-captioning solutions.

Developer Backing

 * James Crook - Keen to see this.

Use Cases
From some discussion:


 * On your mobile phone, load up a language learning lesson, click play, click a button to go back by a logical unit (a whole sentence) another to extend the pause at the end of each sentence, press to get a new word or phrase explained in simpler terms (but still in the foreign language), reach a multiple choice and what you choose affects where you go next.

Random Thoughts
Rockbox players, Android, MIDI controllers, voice-command input. Use at Khan Academy for educational videos.

AAC format supports chapter markers, so we should probably support that in Import/Export.
 * Gale: I guess a minor addiional consideration is that if you use .M4B extension that also supports bookmarking in the player app (playback resumes from where left off).