Structured Audio Player: Supporting Radio Archive Workflows with Automatically Generated Structure Metadata

Abstract

Although techniques to automatically generate metadata have been steadily refined over the past decade, archive professionals at radio broadcasters continue to use conventional audio players in order to screen and annotate radio material. In order to facilitate technology transfer, the archives departments of two large German radio broadcasters, Deutsche Welle and WDR, commissioned Fraunhofer IAIS to develop a prototype audio archive and to investigate the practical aspects of integrating automatically generated metadata into their existing workflows. The project identified the structuring of radio programs as the area in which automatically generated metadata has the clearest potential to support the work of archive staff. This paper discusses the development and performance of the structured audio player, the component of the audio archive system that demonstrates this potential. The automatically generated structured metadata includes speaker boundaries, speaker IDs, speaker gender and identification of audio segments not containing speech. In contrast to similar systems, our prototype was designed, developed and optimized in a project group composed of both archive professionals and multimedia researchers. As a result, important insights were gained into how automatically generated metadata should (and should not) be deployed to support the work of archivists preparing radio content for archival.