Saving "tags" with audio files

    agargara
    Oct 27 2010 | 6:47 pm
    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
      Oct 27 2010 | 7:28 pm
      Check out metatag on our Edge forum:
      https://cycling74.com/forums/metatag-public-beta
      It might not do everything you want, but might be useful regardless.
      -Ben
    • agargara
      Nov 07 2010 | 2:26 am
      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
      Nov 07 2010 | 4:06 am
      for 3 short numbers or words why not use the filename.