AES Show 2024 NY

Metadata is essential in audio files for archiving, discovering, and accessing content. But in current multiplatform environments, metadata management can become difficult and complex. One solution is to implement a monolithic, centralised system, but this is often impractical and overly rigid in dynamic production workflows, since different clients or stakeholders may prefer specific delivery systems. As a result, media managers often have to deal with disparate distribution systems such as file-sharing services, e-mail attachments, download URLs, proprietary APIs, etc. The result of many of these distribution processes is that the audio content and its descriptive metadata often become separated, making the content potentially far less usable.

Embedding metadata in your audio files allows for easier, "one prong" delivery of content, in which you can obtain more robustness as the audio travels downstream along your workflows and into your client's systems. Furthermore, embedding metadata can also simplify system integration from a two-way process to a one-way process, where the receiving system does not need to be aware of specific requirements from the transmitting system.

In this workshop we will explore how the New York Public Radio Archives is using existing metadata fields in archival WAVE files to describe, authenticate, and augment their metadata. Using free or very low-cost tools, alongside well established standards, we will use some of the principles behind W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) to choose embedded metadata that is robust, consistent, and surprisingly flexible.