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AQUAdio - characterization of user-generated audio field recordings

Added by Maurice de Rooij · last edited by Julie Allinson · on Jul 27, 2011 (view change)

One line summary	Tool to extract audio properties and metadata from audio files
Detailed description	AQUAdio is a wrapper script around the Open Source getID3() PHP-library. It extracts all possible information from audiofiles (MP3, WAV, MP4, AIFF, etc.) such as audio properties (bitrate, #channels, sample-frequency, etc.) and metadata (ID3v1, ID3v2, BWAVE metadata, etc) and writes the results to an XML file next to the audiofile. An XSLT stylesheet can be applied to the XML to show the information in a styled way The XML files can be also used by applications such as indexers, viewed in browsers and XML editors such as XMLSpy. Files it does not recognize are moved to a subfolder 'unrecognized' in the same folder. Additionally the wrapper is able to create an MD5 fixity-file next to analysed file, if configured to do so. By default this feature is turned off because it is very CPU-hungry.
Solution champion	Maurice de Rooij
Git link	https://github.com/openplanets/AQuA/tree/master/aquadio
Evaluation	Existing manual approach required significant effort and a variety of specific, GUI-based tools, outputting metadata in a variety of formats. This provides a solution in a single tool for the extraction of metadata to easily-transformable xml. Support of audio file formats is appropriately wide, as is the extraction of metadata from ID3v1-4 tags and BEXT chunks. Collection/issue champion keen to use it - easy to tailor, will save weeks worth of work. Can start using it now. The only real technical obstacles to implementing this are installing PHP, and defining xslt for transformation to catalogue-ready data. Little further testing is required. There is potential to implement this department-wide, and (with development), to implement the solution for wider applications. It works, its ready to implement at my institution.
Tool (link)	getID3()
Issue	Identification and validation of esoteric audio file formats