Development Updates

The Avalon team's demo for sprints 115 & 117 are now available for viewing.

115’s demo highlights:

“Second Scrubber”

·      Extra view on track (or segment) level metadata for an item in Avalon.

·      Corresponds in time and length in offset.

·      Key feature for Variations migration.

“Avalon Wipeout”

One of the past projects that led to the development of Avalon is the Variations digital music library system. In fact, the original name of the Avalon project was “Variations on Video.” Variations was originally developed under a partnership between Indiana University and IBM in the mid-1990s and represented one of the first audio streaming services and first digital repositories of music content on the Internet when it went online in 1996.

One of the major goals of the current phase of Avalon, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is evolving Avalon to include a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) option in order to help grow the Avalon user base.

The Avalon team is excited to announce 3 recent steps made towards cloud-based, hosted solutions:

1)   The Avalon team has successfully completed a number of necessary upgrades towards cloud based services.

The Avalon team's demo for sprint 104 is now available for viewing.

104 focused on:

Announcing Avalon 5.0.1

Release 5.0.1 is a bug fix release. The following issues were resolved:

•  Inconsistencies in Avalon’s media player on some mobile device browsers

•  Captions intermittently failed to appear on the media player when enabled

•  Users would occasionally encounter error screens when searching

The Avalon team's demo for sprint 103 is now available.

103 focused on:

·     Packaging bug release 5.0.1

·     Adding new play list features for 5.1, of note is our markers feature

·     Fedora 4 research for Avalon 6.0 release.

103’s demo is our new marker feature:

·     Markers allow users to add descriptions of moments in time to music tracks and videos within a playlist.

The Avalon team's demo for sprint 102 -- showing our new waffle.io board, walking through our current design for a playlist marker and demonstrating RuboCop in our development branch -- is now available: https://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/avalon:9641

Announcing Avalon 5.0

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon Media System 5.0.

Release 5.0 adds the following capabilities:

·      Organization and Sharing Features

o   Create private or shareable Playlists

o   Add whole audio and video files or clips to playlists

·      Content Ingest API

o   A lightweight API for importing metadata and links to existing derivatives into Avalon.

We've been working on a proof of concept for Fedora 3 to Fedora 4.