Hi

I'm working on a project where I need to parse .avb project files and extract all filenames associated with usage of external audio files (WAV and MP3 files) along with the duration of the usage. Based on this, the application I'm working on should be able to generate a report of the audio used in a production.

How would I best approach this echatrandom task?

The AVB file is not publically documented. Your best option is to export the AVB file to an EDL and then parsing the EDL for the information you're looking to use in your report.

I would make sure your sequence is in a bin on it's own. Turn on reference clips. Set the timeline to show source colours on clips. Sift your bin to find your music/sfx etc, then colour all the audio clips that you need to document one colour so that they show up in the timeline. You can then right click in the timeline and choose to create a new sequence based on those clips. So you should end up with a sequence which is just your audio clips, still in situ as if they were in the full sequence, so you retain the timecodes but lose all the unnecesary sync.

Put that sequence in a bin on it's own and make an EDL of this and that should give you the clip names and in-out durations and timecodes. You could also then use the website EDL Hacker to create an Excel spreadsheet of them.

Andi

It's definitely going to be much simpler to parse an EDL than an AVB file.  To write an app to do it would be trival compared to writing an app to extract the information from an AVB.