| One line summary | The extraction of technical metadata and embedded 'descriptive' metadata from audio files of multiple, esoteric and proprietary formats. |
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| Detailed description | Audio files intended for long-term preservation may be created outside of the control of standardized archival workflows. To archive such files, lossless normalization to a standardized file type is ideal, alongside the accurate description of the original file's technical metadata for inclusion in the recording's catalogue entry. Descriptive metadata (in ID3v1/v2 tags or BEXT chunks) may also contain information useful for the enhancement of catalogue data. Normalization to a single lossless audio format or format or different type risks the loss of such information. The extraction of this metadata is therefore vital prior to normalization. While Jhove performs a similar function for WAVE and MP3 files, support for multiple file formats is limited. |
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| Issue champion | Adam Tovell |
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| Possible approaches | Software tools for describing the technical makeup of digital audio files and their embedded metadata exist, but are limited in functionality, format support and structuring around manual or GUI-based interfaces; requiring the use of multiple tools or parts of tools to achieve a simple, single goal. Manually exporting useful data from such tools is perfectly viable for single files of limited types, but proves inefficient when faced with large and technically-varied collections. Ideally, this would be solved by a single command line-driven tool for exporting metadata in a directly-usable or transformable format (xml, for instance), which could be incorporated into batch scripts to automate large-scale metadata extraction. |
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| Context | British Library Sound & Vision |
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| AQuA Solutions | Characterization of user-generated audio field recordings |
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| Collections | User-generated audio field recordings |
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