On Nov 7, 2018, at 10:03, Rob Landry <41001...@interpring.com> wrote:
> A client of mine used to use AudioVault. I spent lots of hours examining AV > .wav files to see how the metadata was stored, and was surprised to discover > that each file stored its metadata twice: in an AV10 chunk, and again in a > CART chunk; Lord only knows why. I was left to guess which one was supposed > to be authoritative. The CART chunk is publicly documented as an AES standard [AES46-2002-(r2007)] and is there to facilitate interoperability with other systems (a Good Thing). The AV10 chunk is proprietary to AudioVault, and contains additional ‘secret sauce’ (things like outcue strings, post marker location, etc) that are not included in the standard CART chunk. (Rivendell BTW will recognize and use *both* when importing metadata from an AV system). Other vendors have other 'secret sauce’ chunks of their own that serve similar purposes, ‘SCOT’ and ‘ENCO’ being two that come to mind immediately (yes, Rivendell can read those too). > AudioVault struck me as a thinly disguised Pandora's box of chaos and > contradictions. There were layers on top of layers, each one seemingly > written by people who knew nothing about the others. Conway’s Law in action. [See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law] > Date and time formats varied from file to file; I found one in which the > durations of audio files were stored as floating point numbers representing > fractions of a day. My favorite is in a feature of the VMS operating system, where an operator could manually specify a system clock offset at boot time. The units of time used was the micro-fortnight. (I leave it as an exercise for the student to work out a conversion from seconds). > And underlying it all, like Satan in the pit of Dante's Inferno, was Windows, > an operating system written for secretaries and accountants. AVSAT would > crash from time to time during Boston Celtics games when it tried to record > news headlines into a file that AVAIR had cued up to play at the next break. > The Celtics would call for the break, AVAIR would play it, and then there'd > be silence... Rivendell would have handled it all seamlessly. No further comment necessary. Cheers! |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Chief Developer | | | Paravel Systems | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | There is only one thing worse than having your competitors trying | | to inter-operate with your systems - and that is to have your | | competitors *not* trying to inter-operate with your systems. | | --Alan(UK), GrokLaw.net | |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
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