BW64 and ADM

While the ADM is designed to be a general model, its relationship with the BW64 file specified in Recommendation ITU-R BS.2088 is important to explain.

BW64 is the successor of RF64 specified in EBU TECH 3306. So it already contains necessary extensions to support files which are bigger than 4 GB. Apart from that an BW64 file is able to contain the ADM metadata and link it with the audio tracks in the file. To do that a BW64 specifies two new RIFF chunks – the 'axml' chunk and the 'chna' chunk.

'axml' Chunk Brief Description

The 'axml' chunk contains the ADM metadata in the XML file format.

'chna' Chunk Brief Description

A more detailed description of the <chna> chunk can be found here.

The 'chna' (short for ‘channel allocation’) chunk contains a set of IDs for each track in the file to link them with the ADM metadata.

For each track in the chunk the following IDs are given:

• audioTrackFormatID – the ID of the description of a particular audioTrackFormat element. As audioTrackFormat also refers to audioStreamFormat and either audioPackFormat or audioChannelFormat, this ID is enough to describe the format for a particular track.
• audioPackFormatID – the ID of the description of a particular audioPackFormat. As most audioChannelFormats need to be assigned to an audioPackFormat (e.g. ‘FrontLeft’ channel in ‘5.1’ pack), it must be specified in the \<chna> chunk with this ID.
• audioTrackUID – the unique ID that identifies the track. The content descriptor audioObject requires knowledge of which tracks in the file are being described, so contains a list of audioTrackUID references which correspond to audio tracks in the file.

The audioPackFormatID does not have to match the type audio the audioTrackFormatID in each track. A situation where they may differ is when an encoding matrix definition is being used, where the audioTrackFormatIDs will refer to the ‘DirectSpeakers’ input channels to the matrix, and the audioPackFormatID will refer to ‘Matrix’ type encoding matrix pack.

To enable tracks to contain more than one audioTrackFormatID, in order to allow different formats in the track at different times, the track number can be allocated multiple IDs. An example of such as allocation is below:

Track No	audioTrackUID	audioTrackFormatID	audioPackFormatID
1	ATU_00000001	AT_00010001_01	AP_00010001
2	ATU_00000002	AT_00031001_01	AP_00031001
2	ATU_00000003	AT_00031002_01	AP_00031002

Here, track number two has two audioTrackUIDs as the audioTrackFormats and audioPackFormats assigned to it are used at different times in the file. The times of allocation would have to be found be inspecting the audioObject elements that cover those audioTrackUIDs. An example of this is a programme where tracks 1 and 2 contain the theme tune which lasts for the first minute of the file. These tracks are free after this first minute, so some audio objects from the main body of the programme are stored in them subsequently. As the theme tune and the audio objects have completely different formats and contents they require different audioTrackUIDs.