Don:

I'd be very curious as to where you bought this book i.e. who is the 
audio producer.  I'd like to know what commercial vendor is taking 
advantage of SMIL.

It'd be great news.

SMIL stands for synchronized Multimedia Integration Language.  This 
is an open W3C standard that is used in DAISY books, among other 
places, including with videos.

Basically and very simply, with respect to DAISY content, what the 
SMIL files do is to permit the synchronization of the text and 
audio.  If you, for example, had a full-text full-audio DAISY book 
(whether that audio is narrated by a human or TTS), the SMIL files 
would be what would keep the text and audio in sync if you were, for 
example, to be reading the book with a reading system that allowed 
you to hear the audio, while simultaneously examining the text with a 
braille display or with some vision on screen.  When there's 
text-highlighting in a DAISY book, it's the SMIL that makes the 
highlighting and audio stay in sync.

I believe that SMIL can also help with the calculation of time when 
jumping and such.

Hope this helps.  for the really geeky among you, here's the link to 
the SMIL main page, and from that page, you can find specifications 
and the like.  See:

http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/

Maybe there's video in your book, Dan.

Jennifer

At 02:18 PM 4/9/2008 -0400, you wrote:
>I just bought a book as an MP3 cd.  I wanted to copy it to my Victor 
>Stream but noticed that in addition to the MP3 files there are "SMIL" files.
>
>Since I've never heard of this file type, what are they?  Thanks.
>
>
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