AES Standards News Blog

AES31-3 was published in 1999 to provide a long-term alternative to proliferating proprietary formats. It provided a convention for expressing edit data in text form in a manner that enabled simple and accurate computer parsing while retaining human readability. It also described a method for expressing time-code information in character notation and simple automation for stereo & surround panning and audio gain. These edit documents were known as Audio Decision Lists (ADL) and used an Edit Decision Markup Language (EDML).

 

The subsequent growth of XML offers a similar markup facility but with better availability of software tools for faster implementations. XML also offers support for multi-byte characters in human-readable metadata instead of the plain ASCII of EDML, opening implementation to a world-wide user community.

 

AES31-4 sets out a mapping to express EDML as XML as defined by a new XML Schema that closely mirrors the original structure of an Audio Decision List documents as defined in AES31-3.