Drupal Audio Toolkit

Proposed by: Sophea Lerner and Kaustubh Srikanth.

Overview

There is a lot of exciting code being written in the area of participatory distributed collaborative audio creation which lacks a coherent approach to the management of audio content. Drupal Audio Toolkit would harness the powerful content management capabilities of Drupal to support these kinds of audio projects in hybrid radio practice and other participatory media platforms.

At the moment Drupal's media features are scattered across various modules. The Drupal Audio Toolkit would take a standards based approach to handling media and identify existing drupal modules which can be used to define an integrated modular set of tools that would interface with external audio applications.

Goals

The eventual outcome being a toolkit of several drupal modules which talk the same meta data and use the same set of external libraries to work with media. An integral part of the process would be to define a meta data standard which works and can integrate with widely adopted standards for meta data and build a system where importing/exporting to external tools is efficient and to establish effective APIs for integrating audio content managed in Drupal with widely used external audio processing platforms, such as pure data.

What we have right now is several media management modules for Drupal which work differently, use different libraries to handle meta data, encoding etc. What we need is a modular structure which can be controlled centrally with the ability to be able to turn certain functions on or off, based on needs. This toolkit should be able to use Drupal's taxonomy features, which are very flexible, but with the ability to convert that into shareable formats.

Initial phases of this project would include:

1. Research a range of existing projects and practices in this field
2. Assemble prototype meta data and database specifications for handling audio
3. Draft communications / collaboration
4. Specify the most suitable architecture - the system could be either a single module or a collective of modules which interlink with each other.
5. Adapt existing modules into a standard structure - combine modules where needed
6. Research and develop optimized processes to work with various media online
7. Structure communication mechanisms between real-world experimental media applications and software development.

Approach

Key elements of the approach to developing this toolkit will include:

1. A strong emphasis on research and dialogue to make the most of existing experience in this area that is currently scattered across numerous projects in both the open source software and artistic developer communities.
2. An integrated production based approach where the toolkit is developed in parallel with applications in continuous use so that what emerges is directly applicable to creative audio collaboration.