SMIL

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...