Investigate Import of Track Data from Audio Recordings

[joncameron]

Description

Recordings are often digitized in workflows that do not include track-level metadata of the kind delivered by services such as Gracenote and CDDB. In the past these have mostly been queried by having physical media in a drive that can be read in such a way that is uniquely identifiable.

Questions

• Can identifying information in an Avalon record be used to query a third party service, the response from which could be turned into Avalon structure within XML?
• Could there be a way to manually identify a file that could be hooked into a third party service?
• When track metadata exists within files, does it need to be parsed based on container or could FFmpeg or mediainfo provide these in a standard/normalized format?

[joncameron]

Questioning Authority has had third party services added—this could be something that we could tap for this purpose.

[joncameron]

Things have improved a lot from the JHOVE days but parsing could still have oddities. We can look at these tools at least and see what they can deliver. This could be something Active Encode could provide; or it could be a separate process like waveform generation. FFprobe will hopefully be able to provide this, and mediainfo as a backup.