[josm-dev] Audio mapping Plugin

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi Brian,

> I'm writing a plugin for JOSM to enable more efficient audio mapping.

much appreciated :) .

[...]

> The user may use any audio recording device he likes.

I use a mp3 player.

> Depending on his 
> situation he may do one large recording for his mapping tour (as I do, up
> to three hours in one file)

I tried this, but I didn't manage to automatically locate the sections where 
there was speech. To much background noise...

> or record some small snippets when he needs to.

Thus I started recording small snippets. I just bought another device (the 
record button was broken on the previous one...) which allows to pause 
recording. This results in one file containing all speech, but without 
sections with background noise only.

> It is assumed that there will be some way to synchronize the audio time to
> the GPS time. By that it is possible to show the location where the sound
> was recorded. Of course this is not a single location but a subset of the
> gpx trail, with a cursor moving along the GPX trail while the audio plays.

When mounting the device on Linux, all files show the same timestamp back in 
the 1970ies...less chance to correlate the audio recordings to the gpx track 
I guess.

> Synchronized audio mapping allows some new methods to map: For example you
> drive along a road, and each time there is a side road connecting, you say
> "A road from the left, called Huberstaße, connects HERE from 8 o'clock.",
> saying "HERE" at the very point where the roads meet. Don't get me wrong, 8
> o'clock is a direction, not a time :) I've done this hundreds of times now,
> and it really gives sufficient accuracy if you do the synchronization
> properly.

I do the same, but additionally I mark the point with a waypoint. Then I can 
record something like "Point 327: post box on the right.".

[...]

> Now you know what I'm doing, here's my question:
> How should I go on? Shall I restructure my code to make a proper plugin, so
> that there are no changes to the JOSM core? At first this seems to be the
> only good way.
>
> But on the other hand, there are many similarities between photo mapping
> and audio mapping. So I might take all their common features, put then into
> a new class, and subclass the photo layer and the audio layer from that. I
> know of some people who take text notes which could also be geotagged by
> their timestamps. This seems to be the even better way to get nice code.

What really drives me nuts is switching back and forth between josm and my 
audio player. If the player is in the foreground and I press "s" for "select" 
in josm, my audio player switches to "random play" mode. I'm not really sure 
if your code will fit my needs, but if it could simply play a bunch of audio 
files in a folder and would offer some shortcuts directly in josm for play, 
pause, fw and rew, it would surely be a cool thing.

Just my two cents,

ce