[josm-dev] Question about audio file mapping/synchronization

[activityworkshop]

Hi all,

First of all, thanks for JOSM, it's a great tool for contributing to OSM.

I have a few questions regarding the audio functionality of JOSM and the 
various ways it can be used.  I got these questions because I'm the 
author of the "Prune" tool which is used by some people to prepare their 
GPS tracks before importing into JOSM.

Prune can already figure out the locations of photos using their 
timestamps and a corresponding gps track, and I received the following 
feature request for Prune to do the same for audio files:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/prune-gps/forums/forum/682167/topic/3746079

I've now got the basics working (although it's not released yet), but I 
wanted to run things past you josm-devs first.  I noticed that if the 
points attached to the audio files are track points, JOSM seems to 
ignore the audio information.  If I convert them to waypoints in Prune 
and then re-export the gpx file, then JOSM shows the audio files 
properly.  So my first question is, is this intentional behaviour that 
only audio files connected to waypoints are recognised?  Is this likely 
to change in the future?  It's awkward for me because when Prune 
associates the audio file with a point, it's almost 100% certain going 
to be a track point (ie, a point without a name).  Converting all the 
audio points into waypoints is then a pain.

While looking around JOSM's help files, it then strikes me that you 
josm-devs have already done a lot of work on this audio synchronization 
problem, and maybe all this audio stuff doesn't even need to be in Prune 
at all.  If you can do all this in JOSM already, then there's no reason 
to do the same in Prune only to load the files into JOSM anyway.  What 
do you think?

Unfortunately I wasn't able to figure out how to properly synchronize my 
audio files within JOSM, because I couldn't work out how to apply my 
timezone offset (GPS track in UTC, audio files in local time).  Is this 
a feature that's planned, or is the idea to always reset the audio 
recorder (or camera) clock to UTC?

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this!