Saving "tags" with audio files

agargara's icon

I am developing a patch in which I would like to load audio files along with user-defined tags that accompany each file. These tags contain information about the sound's instrumentation, tempo, etc.

I am wondering what is the best practice for storing and loading the information for each file. It would be nice to store the tags with the audio itself somehow, but I know that .wav and .aiff files can't have ID3 tags associated with them.

One idea I had would be to store the information separately in a text file that maps each file name to a set of tags. However, this seems inconvenient, especially if I decide to rename the files, for example. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to parse such a file in Max/MSP. Any tips?

Ben Bracken's icon

Check out metatag on our Edge forum:

It might not do everything you want, but might be useful regardless.

-Ben

agargara's icon

Thanks for your reply. I decided that tagging the files themselves wasn't really necessary, and I'm just going to store the mappings in a text file that can be loaded into a coll object, like this:

001.wav, attribute1 attribute2 attribute3;
002.wav, attribute1 attribute2 attribute3;

We'll see how it goes!

Roman Thilenius's icon

for 3 short numbers or words why not use the filename.