[Audacity-devel] [Fwd: New Label Track Features]

[Shane M. <smu...@ob...>]

This didn't go through when I sent it before because I sent it from a
non-subscribing account.  Sorry if a duplicate shows up.
...

I really like the new label track features.  They fits in really well
with some new functionality I'm adding and should be ready within a week
or so: a "transcription" toolbar.  It will provide functions that help
you identify and select individual words, and easily create labels from
them.  The "Add label at selection" menu option will be accessible via a
button there, as well as other things that are useful for a small set of
users but clutter to many others.

I wanted to open up a discussion on what the format of the "export
labels" file should look like.    Currently, labels can have either a
single point or a cover a region.  The way this was made possible is
really nice--many other software programs have two types of tracks for
these two types of labels. And, labels can overlap with the current
setup. But, only the start point gets saved (and loaded) from the text
file.  Currently, the text file looks like:

0.847528        word1
2.565805        word2
3.333325
4.223255	word3
...

Note that a label can be blank.  I'm not sure if the labels have to be
sorted in the text file. 

It would be nice to save _either_ the length of the word, or the start
and end points of the word.  Without being too concerned about backward
compatibility for the moment, here are some options:

(1) tagged format:

START:   "word"   0.898
END:     "word"   0.992
START:   "word2"  1.003
END:     "word2"  1.432
TAG:     "word3"  1.644
TAG:     ""       1.833

This above could be modified to produce XML for greater buzzword-
compliance.  I don't think it is a good idea, because it hurts the
ability to read into excel, MatLab, R or awk other data analyses
programs.

(2) start-end format
"word1"    1.3223   1.533
"word2"    1.66     1.66
"region3"  1.8      3.0
"word4"    1.9      1.95
""

(3) start-length format
"word1"   1.323     0.15
"word2"   1.53      0
"word3"   1.8       1.0
""        2.1       .3
"word4"   2.2       .1

Note that by placing the text label at the end of the line, we might be
able to get rid of the "", but I'm not sure if that works well--it might
be impossible to save "", " ", and "   " differently.  I think any
format change should include moving to a "" around the text, and maybe
even separated with a visible symbol (commma) instead of tab-
delimited.  

Any thoughts?  Any from people who actually use the label track?  How
important is backward compatibility of the file format?  FWIW, I favor
something like #3, but I'm flexible.

Stm...