Report of the meeting of SC-03-07 working group (formerly SC-06-06) on Audio Metadata of the SC-03 subcommittee on Network and File Transfer of Audio held in Barcelona, Spain, 2005-05-28.

The meeting was convened by chair C. Chambers.

The agenda and the report of the previous meeting were accepted as written.

Development projects

AES-X114: Metadata review
This project's key purpose is to review metadata work across the AES and other professional bodies.

The chairman stated that he will not propose to review the work of SC-03-06 for Libraries and Archive metadata as that meeting was to follow. Anyone interested in this area should stay for that meeting or read that meeting's report.

Project AES-X111 (UMID insertion into the AES3 stream) is being carried out within working group SC-02-02. This task group has completed its work and its output document to PWD. From a metadata point of view, this work will produce a key link between live audio streams and the metadata associated with these streams until such metadata is "wrapped" with the audio in file based structures like BWAV, AAF or MXF. The next stage for AES-X111 will be PCFC and, given that there are no further issues, hopefully can become an approved standard somewhere around October 2005.

The meeting briefly discussed the details of AES-X111 and the use of UMID and UUID in this proposal.

The meeting then went on to discuss the work going on in the EBU to describe "middleware" and its use in system integration. The meeting was shown the latest version of the report published February 2005 and is freely available in two parts as Tech 3300 and Tech 3300s from: http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/publications/index.php

The chair described the format of the report and the work that has been done to develop this and a discussion started on the issues this raised. Members are encouraged to download these reports and to use them within their organisations as needed.

AES-X134: Core audio metadata XML definitions.
The goal of this task group is to produce a number of metadata "sub sets" for specific tasks, and map these sets to the administrator and audio schemas being produced in SC-03-06 that could be considered as defining the metadata "super set".

The chair tabled a proposed project scope for AES-X134 as follows.

"To study and produce a standardised set of XML tags, along with their definitions, that should describe the core set of metadata to accompany professional audio when being transferred by file or streamed formats." This scope was approved by the meeting.

There was a discussion on the range of work covered by this project. It was made clear that this work was to support a business-to-business professional audio model. It was agreed that from work already done by NRK, it was likely that this group could come up with around 20 tags. The chairman asked that NRK put up their list of tags on the reflector before the next convention.

It was agreed that the difference between files or streamed media for this core metadata point of view is purely an implementation issue as nothing is stated to say how this metadata is wrapped with the media or not. A stream of media may simply contain a unique ID which refers to the metadata set being transferred. This is just a particular implementation and should not limit the work in this group.

The meeting agreed that particular implementations and detailed technical schemas would be out of scope for AES-X134.

As the last task group meeting was held in Berlin, it was hoped that this work should be progressed as soon as possible and the placing of the 20 or so tag list on the reflector would be a good start.

Liaisons

AES-XP138: IFPI Liaison.
A discussion was held covering the importance of liaison with the professional recording industry and the need for them to be able to control the copying of media in the public domain while professional production companies need to be able to distribute the same media within internal systems when the rights have been purchased to use this material.

Following the arrival of representatives of the IFPI, there was a discussion on the use of ISRC references to help the control of disk and track copying. (See:- http://www.ifpi.org/isrc/isrc_handbook.html) As discussed earlier, how this kind of approach will work with professional production and broadcast bodies who have the need to copy material perfectly legitimately with their originations need to be addressed. The IFPI representatives stated that this would need to be studied, as there were a number of special cases where legitimate copying is required.

This Liaison project is now running as it should as all the original requirements have been delivered.

SMPTE Registration Authority
There is an outstanding matter of the setting up of a formal liaison in with the SMPTE registration authority, which is now assigned to SC-03-07. It was explained that this would be set up as the need arises. Currently, it would seem that the main use of this registration authority within the SMPTE has been to provide a method to maintain and manage changes to the metadata dictionary.

A question arose as to whether the AES should have a liaison with the EBU P/MAG group. At least one of the SC-03-07 is also a member of P/MAG so it was felt that currently there was no need for a formal liaison to be set up.

New Projects

There were no new projects

New Business

There was no new business.

The next meeting will be scheduled in conjunction with the 119th AES Convention in New York, US., 2005-10