Proposal Structured Audio
From Audacity Wiki
Proposal pages help us get from feature requests into actual plans. This page is a proposal for a structured audio format, primarily for language learners. |
Proposal pages are used on an ongoing basis by the Audacity development team and are open to edits from visitors to the wiki. They are a good way to get community feedback on a proposal.
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- Note: Proposals for Google Summer of Code projects are significantly different in structure, are submitted via Google's web app and may or may not have a corresponding proposal page.
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).