audio

I want to publish more interview audio, but I need to make a modification to Drupal before I do -- and I might need some PHP coding help to do it.

I want to be able to have an RSS feed that people can pop into iTunes at any time and download all 86 of my interviews.

UPDATE: I've successfully written a Drupal module to do this. I'll post it below.

I need to have my audience be able to very quickly and easily have access to all of my source material by copying one feed into an audio aggregator and let it do a bulk download of all the files.

Expecting people to download each interview is out of the question -- there are too many. I could split it up separate feed sections, but I want to make downloading all of the files as easy as possible with four easy steps:

1. Copy the feed
2. Paste it in the subscribe window
3. Download all the files
4. There is no step four

And so I imagine that this will require a relatively simple Drupal module or "PHP node" that can produce the necessary XML data to do the trick.

I welcome any help in making this happen since it seems like it should be a pretty useful feature to have.

I specifically need to take all of the nodes that have the "Interview Audio" tag, and produce the RSS code to send down the Feedburner feed.

The issue is that my regular feed is limited to displaying 25 posts -- and I also have the full text selected.

This means that this Drupal only displays the last 25 posts for all of the feeds, but for the posts tagged with "Interview Audio" I want it to display the last 86 posts.

I also don't want to send the full text down the "Interview Audio" feed because I plan on posting the entire transcript with each audio file, and this would inevitably exceed Feedburner's bandwidth limit by the time I would reach the 86th post.

So either I need to dig into the Drupal code myself and hack something together, or I need to find someone who can help out.

I'm going to assess the solution until I run into a road block, and then I can start publishing more interview audio.

Below I've posted the code for the module...

I will be publishing more Interview Audio as soon as this technical issue is resolved.

So please subscribe to the Interview Audio Feed -- or the more inclusive All Media Feed -- and start listening.

There is 50+ hours worth of quality information and knowledge that I've collected so far, and people need to start digesting it. That's because I'm going to need your help with editing sound bite sequences -- as well as gathering a larger context for the footage by you becoming familiar with material and then sharing what it means to you through the various mechanisms that are put into place.

So I'm going to be releasing the audio in the following four chunks.

[1] 13 interviews conducted at the Personal Democracy Forum -- Post-production is completed and will be posted soon.
[2] 10 Media & Consciousness interviews
[3] 8 We Media Conference Interviews
[4] The 45 interviews with Journalists, Media Critics, Journalism Professors, Think Tank Scholars, Retired Government Analysts. International Lawyers and Other Perspectives.

The first three chunks are the solution-oriented interviews that are investigating how to more tightly integrate the latest new media trends into journalistic practices. The are all of fairly short 5 to 25-minute interviews that I conducted at conferences throughout 2005 and 2006.

The bulk of the 45 sit-down interviews were conducted during the summer of 2004 right after the New York Times Mea Culpa, and before all of the media controversies leading up to the 2004 election. These were much more extensive and in-depth 30 to 90-minute interviews focusing on both the systemic and specific problems with the media during the build-up to the Iraq war.

So hopefully the technical development of the collaborative filmmaking infrastructure will eventually be completed and converge with a large community of volunteers who have listened to the source material and are all eager to start editing sequences together for the first-ever, massively scalable collaborative documentary.

VICTORY! I am now able to dynamically generate audio metadata and have it be recognized by Quicktime as an edited sound bite sequence! This is a HUGE breakthrough for my collaborative editing schema. Here is a demo of a sequence of three sound bites that have been excerpted from longer audio files and strung together.

I've found a way for Drupal to automatically edit sound bite sequences without having to generate any text files or generate muxed audio files that need to be written to the server.

UPDATE 3/29/06 This URL has the dynamically generated SMIL code (i.e. take a look at the source code for the page to see the SMILtext). And then here is an embedded version of this SMIL metadata:

More details below...

This is an explanation for how to edit together sound bite excerpts from longer MP3 files using something called SMIL -- or "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language."

I've completed some successful experiments with SMIL and Quicktime that provide a promising solution for collaborative editing. A browser-based editing system could use the playlist mechanism to create sequences of sound bites. I discuss this more in these conversations with Lucas Gonze, Colin Brumelle and Farsheed -- and in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

I'm passing along this information along so that some developers can add SMIL export functionality to the Drupal playlist module.

What does all of this mean?
I could upload the audio from the 45+ hours of interviews that I've conducted for this project, and then combine this SMIL mechanism with Drupal so that volunteers could start helping edit the film. This Collaborative Filmmaking schamatic has more details.

These volunteer edits would be dynamically generated online with SMIL, and other people could listen to them and rate them. The good edits could be translated into real offline edits via the IN and OUT times being exported through Final Cut Pro XML generated by Drupal.

SMIL is a pretty simple mark-up language similar to HTML that allows the creation of audio and video edit decision lists.

You can create a small text file that points to the IN and OUT times of audio or video source files, and then this SMIL file can then be played with Quicktime or Realplayer. It is a simple way to edit audio and video together using text mark-up language, which could easily be automatically generated from a playlist of sound clips.

Below are more details for using SMIL for dynamic editing of audio and video content...