📚 What Recordings, Clients and Projects are
- A Recording is a period of recorded data from one or more data sources. For example, it could be 10 seconds of audio, ultrasound and video that happened at the same time. Usually, one Recording is one sentence you get your Client to speak.
- Recordings are contained inside Clients. A Recording always belongs to a Client.
- A Client is the person you are recording, ie. your participant / patient.
- Clients are contained inside Projects. A Client always belongs to a Project.
- A Project is a self-contained database that can have many Clients and Recordings in it. This is a useful way to organize your work.
- One Project is one database on your computer.
- A Project can be split up into smaller projects using AAA, but you cannot split it up using Windows File Explorer!
- Some people like to have one Project for their whole research project; they like this because this makes data analysis comparing between Clients easier. Other people like to make one Project for each person they record, meaning that their research project consists of many Projects each with only one Client; they like this because it makes it easy to make backups if they have a very large amount of data (which you should do often regardless of what organisation you prefer!).
AAA stores your data in a special database structure. This is so it can work with different kinds of data fast and allow you to do complex analyses.
A database is always stored inside one folder in Windows. It consists of:
- A core database file (Data.aa0) which contains every bit of information smaller than 4 bytes. This includes annotations, prompts, client details, and other small pieces of information.
- Each single unit of information larger than 4 bytes is a separate file. This includes audio, video, ultrasonic and EPG data. These files are called "Chunk" files (for example Chunk_1.aa0, Chunk_2.aa0, etc.).
The software can cope with data that does not have a regular sample rate. Every frame or sample of data is time stamped to the nearest 100,000th of a second (which is every 10 microseconds). The only exception to this is audio data; audio data is the ground truth for all other data streams. Audio data must have regular sample intervals and must have a sample rate associated with it. It gets the sample rate from the recording device, but you can change it manually if it's incorrect. Even if this rate is inaccurate, it becomes the clock to which all the other streams are synchronised.
Every recording must have an audio track. i.e. other data streams cannot be recorded by AAA without audio. AAA can load any database made by AAA, but it can only load one database at a time.
