Managing Your Sample Library With Tags

A PROBLEM

I have 4GB of wave files.

A lot of it is percussion samples that I downloaded, created myself or bought, there’s some parts from remix contests, arps, drum kits, pads, bass lines, loops of every description, vocal recordings, parts from friends’ tracks. Basically, detritus from years of writing music throw together in a junkyard heap. Yes. I have a junkyard on my hard drive that I sometimes sift through looking for a part that fits.

But it’s not enough. I need more.

The vast majority of what I want to keep is locked away in other files and not useful to me unless I go through a laborious process of firing up Cubase, Reason or Ableton Live, extracting, trimming and editing the raw materials I want to reuse. And reuse is important, I’ve decided. Usually I start fresh every time, I guess because I thought it would be cheating otherwise. No more. But since my new policy is to extract the raw materials from each track, it’s clear that the existing strategy of dumping it all into a junkyard is unworkable.

How would I find anything?

This post is about tagging and organizing my data.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

1. Use WinFS. This is new technology from Microsoft that will likely be the permanent solution to this problem when it is released. On the downside, this is only available to MSDN subscribers and who knows if this will actually let me do what I want it to do yet, since its in beta. I will re-evaluate this option in May when beta 2 comes out.
2. Buy a Mac. OS X has Spotlight, which looks like what I want, but this is an expensive solution, both in initial costs and when I need to upgrade. Right now, I can spend about $500 every year to upgrade to a faster processor, making that $2000 a year just so I can use one tool is ridiculous.
3. Google/Yahoo/MSN Desktop Search. I used Google Desktop for a few months. The major issue is that I need to be able to drag and drop files into Ableton Live, and Google (and Yahoo) produces search results in a browser window, although there is an add-on utility for Google that might help with that. So Yahoo is disqualified, and I’m favoring the Evil Empire’s solution

ROADBLOCKS

A major issue is whether it is possible to add metadata to .wav files. It turns out that there is such a thing, called the RIFF INFO tag, its not well-supported though. Its not supported in Windows file properties summary page for .wav files, but installing dbpowerAMP R12 beta adds its own property editor for metadata. Sound Forge supports this too, so those are both good options for getting tags into files. There are a number of other lossless audio formats with well-support metadata, notably AIFF and FLAC. Both are supported by Ableton Live, but this would require a conversion process and either breaking existing tracks that used the .wavs or keeping a .wav set for past tracks. Disk space is cheap, so this could be a viable choice. Additionally, Sound Forge saves AIFF metadata, including the region list and ACID properties, in a separate file, which basically means I would lose this information.

A second issue is whether GDS/MSN know about .wav metadata, which is not well supported. After some testing, it looks like they don’t. It’s possible to create a plugin that would do this, but they are written in the heathen tongue of Windows COM objects. It would take a lot work to create something usable, but I’m seriously considering buying a book and just doing it. It will make me a better person or something.

In the meantime, MSN Desktop Search supports drag and drop, understands AIFF metadata which can be edited easily enough from the Windows shell and Ableton Live export as AIFF. Although I’d really like to be able to work with wav metadata, this looks like the best solution until I can wrap my head around Windows COM.

Downtime

Every afternoon (PST), my host goes down. You can set your watch by it. Sorry about that, Beatport Feeds and BeatportWidget users. It looks like they are doing some maintenance here and there, which means yet more downtime.

BeatportWidget for Yahoo! Widget Engine

Latest Version: 0.22 updated on 2006-01-21

ABOUT

BeatportWidget is a Yahoo! Widget tool to automatically notify DJs of new releases from Beatport.com, previewing audio samples and saving favorites – it’s seriously awesome. Check out this screenshot. This tool and its author are not affiliated with Beatport.com. This tool hasn’t been widely tested, so consider it beta and feel free to report bugs and make suggestions in comments below.

REQUIREMENTS

• Windows XP/2000 or Mac OS X 10.3+
• Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0+
• del.icio.us account (Optional but highly recommended)

INSTALLATION

1. Download and install Yahoo! Widgets Engine.
2. Download BeatportWidget-0.21.zip and extract it into your widget folder.
• Windows XP = ‘My Documents/My Widgets’
• OS X = ???
3. If necessary, set up a free account with del.icio.us so you can save your favorites.
4. Launch BeatportWidget from your widget folder

CONFIGURATION

1. Right-click on the BeatportWidget window.
2. Select ‘Widget Preferences…’
3. Choose a genre that you would like to keep track of
4. Enter your del.icio.us account information in the fields
5. Click on ‘Save’

USAGE

• Click on the speaker icon to hear the track preview.
• Click on the tag icon to save the track as a favorite. The icon will change to the del.icio.us logo, which you can click on to view all your favorites.
• BeatportWidget checks for updates every 30 minutes.
• If you can’t wait, you can force it to update by saving your preferences again. But don’t do this too much. The RSS Feeds that the widget uses only update every hour anyway.
• You can run multiple copies of this widget configured to different genres. To do this, make a copy of the file ‘BeatportWidget.widget’ in your widget folder and give it a different name.
• Your favorites are marked with two tags: ‘beatportfavorites’ and a genre tag. Go to http://del.icio.us/your_username to manage your favorites or click on the icon in the widget.
• See other users’ favorites!
• If you are looking for something with a few more features, I use an RSS reader called GreatNews.

Sneak Preview

Here’s a screenshot of something that I’m working on for you guys…

Daniel Mnookin Blogs

Daniel Mnookin, host of Proton Radio’s Tic Tech Toe, is all set up with a blog on ProtonRadio.com. Only you can’t comment on this supposed blog, or trackback to it. I can’t add it to my RSS reader, because RSS feeds aren’t provided. There’s no links to related blogs either. Blogs are supposed to be a conversation, not a monologue! Aren’t they? Yes, they are. (Update: A thread on Proton Forums has been started for comments.)
This is all the more frustrating since Daniel Mnookin’s insightful and engaging writing deserves all of those things. For example:

“While many people (generally those that don’t live here) worship our city as a nightclubbing Mecca that gave birth to house music, I’ve found this claim to be both a blessing a curse. On one hand, Chicago is an amazing city and the nightlife scene here offers more than most other cities worldwide. Conversely, I constantly feel that Chitown tends to be too rooted in its past (without a doubt there are exceptions) and sometimes fails to progress at the pace of other major clubbing capitals.”

This is an important insight. And not just because I’ve been saying it for years, although its good to have it confirmed by someone who seems like they would know from experience, unlike my own wild conjectures held together with irresponsible assumptions and crack-pot theories. For me, this is a critical issue for the few of us who believe that electronic dance music in all its many varities has something compelling and vital to offer.

Mainstream music offers people a sense of identity, a category that makes them simple and understandable, uncomplicated. Making electronic music into a lifejacket for insecure teens to grasp hold of and help them form a sense of self in exchange for fattening the wallets of record label executives is as bad an idea now as it was in the 90s. Advertisers then preys upon their weaknesses, poisoning their minds while selling them the one-size-fits-all cure. Of all the methods to find an audience, this is probably the most vile and most destructive to the music itself. People hold on to the past for this same sense of security. It tells them who they are in an environment that demands to know so it can fit you into a demographic and sell you soda.

Ironically, in this demographic-ized culture, the largest audience consists of the outsiders, the people who don’t belong. Subcultures should encourage people to speak with radical authenticity, without worrying about saying something stupid or going outside of the restrictive boundaries. It could provide healing, not just a temporary escape from suffering.