The Audio Engineering Society does an outstanding job of sorting out the myriad ways in which pieces of audio equipment should function properly and communicate with one another, primarily by developing an array of industry-sanctioned standards that are now in daily use around the planet. But then it came time to address a vexing problem : “How do we transfer audio files and their project information from one brand of DAW to another, via removable media and over an internet/intranet, or onto a archiving format?” The initial response was was stony silence, followed by a myriad of opinions about what worked best, for what reason, and with what future-proof functions.

After four long years of careful deliberation, the AES recently published the first two parts of its four-part AES31 File Transfer Format standard, with two parts more to come. At the recent AES Convention in New York, the AES SC06-01 on Audio-File Transfer and Exchange Working Group met once again to continue an ongoing dialog and consider new elements. Another important meeting held at the AES Convention involved a plenary meeting of the AES31 Trade Association. More on this later.

Under the capable chairmanship of Mark Yonge, former SSL Digital Product Manager and now AES Standards Manager, the AES Standards Working Group SC-06-01 has refined a set of technical specifications which, when implemented in a workstation, will allow disk drives, digital audio media and Edit Decision Lists to be transferred from one AES31-compliant workstation system to another. AES31’s four-tier approach forms a series of scalable modules with interchange options that combine to produce a multi-part standard.

•AES31-1 defines the Physical Data Transport, or the way in which files move from one system to another as FAT32-compliant data.
•AES31-2 defines the Audio File Format, or the way in which our specified BWF or Broadcast Wave files should be arranged on removable media or travel on a network.
•AES31-3 defines a Simple Project Structure, which is based on a sample-accurate ADL or Audio Decision List.
• The more sophisticated AES31-4 Object Oriented Project Structure (as yet undefined)could be based on an extensible object model capable of describing a much wider range of parameters

As I discovered, the Working Group's primary focus is based on three aspects: Simplicity, Reliability and Competence. In essence, they have developed a file standard based on three elements: FAT32, Broadcast Wave File (BWF), plus a simple project structure to allow exchange of edited material. FAT32 supports drives up to 2 Terabytes, and uses space more efficiently because of its smaller cluster size. FAT32 can also be handled by the majority of MacOS, Unix and Windows platforms. Developed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and based on conventional RIFF/Wave audio files, BWF also carries a set of data bits that define the audio data format, describe the sound sequence, its originator plus a time reference. (Basically, BWF time stamps each audio file with its proper location in a project, and adds useful ID information that incorporates the SMPTE’s Unique Material Modifier. This UMID serves to associate external metadata with the audio files, and will be very handy for tracking the source and/or ownership of AES31-compliant data within, for example, an Asset Management system.) Broadcast Wave files can be played on any system capable of replaying conventional WAVE files.