Report of the SC-06-06 Working Group on Audio Metadata of the SC-06 Subcommittee on Network and File Transfer of Audio meeting, held in conjunction with the AES 113th Convention in Los Angeles, CA, US

The meeting was convened by Chair C. Chambers.

The agenda and the report of the previous meeting were approved.

Current projects

AES-X114 Metadata Review
The meeting discussed EBU proposals to add an XML chunk to BWF audio files. The meeting reviewed the draft EBU documents and discussed the XML chunk and also binary chunk proposals. No issues were raised.

The project is continuing.

New projects

The meeting discussed a request to initiate a new project entitled �Core metadata XML definition� project group. Its objective would be to produce a standardised set of XML tag definitions to enable the use of XML to transfer a core set of metadata between general programme production applications as well as more general exchanges of production media. It is anticipated that this project would require close liaison with the EBU, for example, in setting these definitions.

An example set of XML documents - posted to the SC-06-06 document site in the subdirectory, �XML example� were discussed. It was felt that this work would be better handled by SC-03-06 where this could be combined with other, similar, work being carried out there.

It was noted that such XML examples could not usefully be handled as simple PDF documents; as XML work in progress they needed to be displayed flexibly using some form of XML viewer or editor.

A structure for work to address both archive metadata and operational metadata, functionally and technically, was discussed. The issues this raised were then considered in the context of work being carried out within various AES standards groups. The Secretariat suggested that the working group might wish to produce a technical report on the development of metadata structures within our industry. It was suggested that the EBU P/META schema needs to be studied closely and the framework it describes could be developed within this group. The data content and descriptions (Metadata dictionary) might be better handled by SC-03-06. It should be remembered that the current Metadata dictionaries being developed within SMPTE tend to be rather specific to broadcast [television?]. The work in AESSC should probably bring in the Music industry to develop a more general dictionary. A formal liaison with the group carrying out metadata work within MPEG was suggested.

Chambers pointed out that the working group does not currently have sufficient resource to carry out much of the detailed work required overall and cooperation with other groups would be required.

Liaison

The meeting considered the work of SC-02-02-G which is developing a draft proposal for inserting a Unique Material Identifier (UMID) into an AES3 transport stream. This proposal allows for the use of a 32 byte or 64 byte UMIDs as described in SMPTE 330M. It was considered urgent that a request for additional reserved code to identify the existence of UMID information in a AES3 block be passed to SC-02-02 for action so this may be considered in their current work on the revision of the AES3 standard. This meeting therefore felt that the proposal from SC-02-02-G to be considered as a matter of urgency.

New business

There was no new business.

The next meeting being held in conjunction with the AES 114th Convention in Amsterdam, Netherlands.