Audio Metadata Authoring and System Integration

The ATSC Audio system depends on audio metadata for many of its most attractive features, Listeners gain the ability to tailor the presentation of different styles of program to their individual requirements. Producers gain a great deal of control over how individual program material is presented to the listeners. They have, for example, direct control over the balance of downmixes of multichannel material, and can choose how the dynamic range of a program is reduced, if the listener chooses a presentation with less than the full original dynamics. — The metadata associated with a particular program must of course accurately reflect the characteristics of that program, if the system is to operate correctly. This implies that a new set of metadata parameters has to be created (or authored) for each program, and in that sense, metadata authoring can be seen as a parallel and very similar process to the creation of the audio program itself. — The paper will examine the creative aspects of authoring metadata and the range of choices that are available to the program producers, and several different methods of specifying the various parameter values. Metadata can be created at several different stages of program production; these will be examined to determine the most appropriate “location” at which to author the parameters, with particular attention paid to the process of production of broadcast material. Metadata can be monitored and edited as it passes through a typical broadcast chain. Reasons for doing this and appropriate methods of changing parameter values are also discussed.