[ID3 Dev] Accessibilty extension draft is posted

[Ben Bennett]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 04:23:02PM +0200, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 June 2006 16:02, Chris Newell wrote:
> > The draft proposal recommends that unsynchronisation is applied but perhaps
> > this should be a mandatory if AudioText frames are present.

Remeber, unsync only matters if the player can't understand the ID3v2
format.  If it knows how to at least read the header it can get the
tag length and skip it all.

> One option might be instead of creating individual frames for each 
> corresponding text frame to create a dictionary of string -> audio pairs.
> 
> That would, incidentally get around another problem that I just thought of:  
> updating.
> 
> With the current draft, if you sent me a file with the genre set to "Jazz" and 
> a corresponding audio text frame, if I set it to "Blues" the content would be 
> out of synch.  Using a dictionary approach instead would mean that a lookup 
> for "Blues" would fail and (appropriately) there would be no corresponding 
> audio text.

That is cute.  I was going to say that this breaks simple updates,
e.g. case changes or the like.  But your example shows why you _want_
to break on things like that.  It probably makes sense to do the
lookups with "cleaned up" strings (lowercase, leading and trailing
whitespace stripped, internal whitespace reduced to one space).

Though if there is a long string duplicating it entirely may be excessive.
 
> > My view (and I'd be happy to be proved wrong) is that producing good
> > Computer Generated Speech on low profile devices like MP3 players is quite
> > hard whereas the implementation of AudioText frames is really simple.
> 
> That occurred to me after I sent this, but the thing that most occurs to me is 
> kind of a critical mass argument.  For this sort of information to be useful 
> in common practice it would require a large scale adoption -- i.e. having 
> this on 1% of MP3s wouldn't make devices as a whole usable.  A possible 
> solution would be to also develop an application that can do text generation 
> and automatically write these fields.

I think the idea is good in general.  Rockbox already has audio
navigation cues, I am not sure of the specifics, I just saw it in this
article: http://lwn.net/Articles/182633/

BTW Rockbox is aparently used a lot by the blind community and runs on
a lot of hardware (including iPods).  So if you make an automatic
generator and Rockbox adds support I think this will take off.

			-ben

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