Technology Audio: Colin Brumelle, Drupal Playlist Module

Hey Sull,
I checked out Spread The Media and it looks great. Awesome theming job.

I've started hacking into the playlist module and am able to dynamically stream together SMIL code that is played as a movie.

I'm also in the process of implementing nested playlists so that you can build larger sequences from other people's sequences.

And I have a more specific roadmap of what needs to be done for collaborative editing for The Echo Chamber Project (i.e. collaborative tags, ajax interface, ratings, feeding back social network effects to individual nodes, etc.)

Some more technical details are below.
I'd love for you to help out. :)
-Kent.

That's great to see that you're taking a look at Drupal!

I'm in the process of abstracting the code for sequencing sound bites from a multi-dimensionally nested playlist sequence -- trying to integrate error checking to prevent infinite recursions, etc.

This will enable larger editing projects to be generated through collaboratively created nested playlisted sequences.

I'm about 50% through with that and after this is done, then it should be pretty straight forward with integrating it with Drupal functionality that already exist or needs to be modified. It'll be a matter of piecing it all together with an intuitive UI.

I'm also tweaking the database schema to store Final Cut Pro XML metadata as well as using flexinode to store the transcript, screenshot and other info. I can generate valid FCP XML from playlisted sequences, and feed collaboratively edited sequences back into FCP offline editing.

I'm looking foward to the 4.7 release and official launch of CCK since flexinode is going to be phased out. But I can still piece together what I'm doing until that happens.

The forms API should also make it a lot easier to add tags to nodes on the fly. At the moment, only users can only tag nodes that they created -- and I've seen a site that has modified it to incorporate del.icio.us-like collaborative tagging.

I'm imagining that tagging could be an ad hoc way of aggregating and organizing sound bites into many different groups. It should be simple to then add these grouped sound bites into playlist sequences so that you can dynamically preview what the edit sounds like. I've sucessfully demonstrated that 48 kHz MP3s at 1.2MB/5min can maintain miniDV timecode continuity good enough to facilitate collaborative editing on a large scale.

Integrating the video track will be a matter of creating 2 parallel A/V playlists with an AJAX interface that maintains proportional timecode durations. I'm integrating FCP XML metadata into the database schema so that this will be fairly intuitive jump for my project.

And then it'll then be a matter of figuring out how to make all of this work for other multimedia files that don't have timecode metadata.

Anyway, let me know if you're interested in helping piece this type of system together in Drupal!