IASIG WAWG Guidelines Document

Ver. 1.0, July 2001

This WAWG Guidelines document is meant to guide the Working Group (WG) towards achieving its stated goals, and should be consulted regularly by the WG members to verify that they are doing what has been proposed and agreed. However, the goals and tasks in this document should not be considered final and absolute. For one thing, I consider them just a beginning -- I am sure there are a lot of important things I forgot to include. So please feel free to make comments and suggest changes at any point in the WG process.

WG Objectives

The definition, categorization and standardization of the tools used to create interactive audio environments over the internet. By audio" we mean to describe single and combinatorial use of music, sound efffects (including ambient noise), and voice over.

Specific goals we may want to pursue include:

• Influencing the future development (and possibly standardization) of the tools used to create interactive web audio environments.
• Improvements in Authoring tools, Techniques and practices
• Cross platform compatibility between products
• A closer working relationship between creatives in the field and various product designers.

Stage 1, Review

Taking a close look at the current platforms and their advantages and disadvantages. We will look at the current platforms from the ground up attempt to produce a detailed document overview of the products currently available. Suggested platforms are:

• Beatnik .RMF (Beatnik)
• Real audio .RA (Real)
• Shockwave/Flash/Flash API .SWF (macromedia)
• Quick Time/OS X (APPLE)
• Windows Digital Media/Directmusic/Direct X (Microsoft)
• MP3 and other compression technologies
• iShell (Tribeworks)
• Java Sound API

Not platform related but also possibly of interest to this discussion are Voice XML and MXF.

Stage 2, Statements & Recommendations

Once the initial platform review is completed, we can use this overview to access the current state of Audio development over the web, including getting an accurate statement of what the focus has been to date and what would be nice to have for the future.

Questions we should try to answer include:

• What are the current technologies and market influences?
• What formats are already appearing and are they currently marketed?
• What are the encoding possibilities, Advantages and Disadvantages, of the current tools?
• What are the playback possibilities, Advantages and Disadvantages, of the current tools?
• What are the needs of the creative community that are not being met or addressed by the current level of technology and where do things need to go?
• What might be the best way to proceed?
• What resources and libraries already exist to speed up this process?
• What sort of interactivity are users really interested in?

Proposed Outline for the White Paper:

1. What can we do at stage one to increase the quality of delivery to the end user?
   Analysis and Description of any pre-processing and advanced preparation of audio files for each format. For example, the use of the Waves plug-in suite or other tools to get the audio ready for encoding. (this would require testing and documentation, maybe even verification of findings by more then one person, so teams of two or more for each platform might be a good way to go on this).
   

2. Does it work and if so is it hard to use?
   Analysis of the current encoding tools and visual environments for each platform. (Do they suck or rock and why?)
   

3. What are the pros and cons of the platforms delivery to the end user?
   Analysis and description of the sound quality issues of each platform and codex as they relate to file size, delivery over the web, Marketing issues, large Vs small companies , and any inherent advantages that one platform might have over another.
   

4. What is the quality of the interactivity of the platform?
   Does it have any interactive uses? is it a great idea that just need a little bit more programming to get it up to speed on the interactive audio front?
   

5. What can be done to improve the platform?
   These would be specific recommendations and suggestions for making the platform better in relationship to interactive audio design. Hopefully the working teams would have had enough contact with the developers at this point that they could be very specific as to what it might take to code in new cool features. And, is the manufacturer willing to do so and if so in what kind of time frame?