Hi,
I've tried alot of things but never find a way to recover any BH metadata (keywords or description) in the protools workspace.
I like to use both when working, and it will be great if i can have a way to edit some metatada in BH that i can recover in Protools.
I am not a PT user but would need to know what you mean? What metadata specifically do you wish to see? Basehead stores rich text metadata in the header of the files (if you have burned the data into your files) in the iXML standard which is designed for extended metadata beyond the ID3 tagging format. The great thing about iXML is it is unencrypted and simple to read by any software.... but that software needs to have the ability to read it so if PT does not have this ability then you will not see this info available. You would need to request to Avid to consider adding iXML support for audio files.
Hi,
thanks for your response. So i tried to investigate a little more but i'm not a database professionnal.
I quite don't mind which specifical field metadata, it only has to be text.
So i tried to enter in that fields :
"keyword" "comments" "notes" , and then i burned the new metadata and in protools workspace i reindex the files. But, it never worked. The keywords or comments didn't appear in pro tools workspace's fields.
But i discover one thing about the description field :
In protools workspace, there are 2 "comments fields" : a "database comments", and one "file comments"
If i have a value in the "file comments" pro tools workspace field, i find the value, not in the "comments" BH field but in the NOTES field, and in the "DESCRIPTION field with a prefix : aNOTE=value. But it there is another value in the BH description field the value only appears in the "Notes" field.
Now if i enter a value in BH in "description" field, i find the value in protools workspace in "File comments" which is great !
But if i enter a value in "File comments" in pro tools, it appears in "Notes" in BH, and thats a little strange.
So it's a litlle annoying cause the correspondance isn't the same, but i guess i can work that way.
I aloso notice that the description field is very slow to type in.
Coming back with a question...
So, for my workflow, i just saw that the best way to work is to replace all the "Description" fields in BH.
I have more than 17 000 sounds in my database, coming from all sound recorders, from all countries, and so there are not at all the same way of medatada edits. But i can see that the "description" field has sometimes nothing, sometimes the name, and sometimes the whole metadata informations with strings like aUbit, aNotes, etc...In that particular case, the informations are already in the other fields : Bit, frequency etc..
Sometimes the important information for me is "aNOTE" and that information appears in the field "NOTES" in the BH database and in the field "File Comments" in the workspace of Protools.
So if i replace all the "Description" fields in BH, with the "Notes" field, i don't loose any pertinent information.
I can after inject to the files all the new informations with the burn in process and have a nice interaction with the workspace in protools.
But, it appears that in Batch rename, i can't do that with a lot of sound files. 20 seems to be the most files i can do. Is there something i miss ? I would be happy to do that process with all my 17 000 files, even if it takes a long time.
Thanks
But, it appears that in Batch rename, i can't do that with a lot of sound files. 20 seems to be the most files i can do. Is there something i miss ? I would be happy to do that process with all my 17 000 files, even if it takes a long time.
The batch processor should be able to process however many files you have selected, at least that is how it should work. First search and filter the files you need to change then shift + select the range (or Ctrl/CMD + A) to select all. The number of available results to work with will be limited by the "Max Records" you have set in Options > Misc.
If you are selecting a range of files but only 20 have been renamed, check in the Options if you have the advanced option "RAM database" and make sure that is disabled. It's a new feature for faster searches but could be the cause of issue for the batch processor maybe. If still having issues, submit a ticket so we can probe iot a bit further.
I appears that it can't do batch rename with multiple types selected. I have to order by type and it works.
i will update my database that way thanks
@mikbar It should still work, that would be a bug IMO. If you can possibly create a ticket with the details of what you found and possibly attach your database we can look into it and have a fix probably. At least let me know what kinds of file extensions they are and I can try and run a test on my end.
the batch rename i'm doing is :
source : notes
destination : description in "replace mode"
very repeatable : if you try with wav and aiff, it doesn't work, but i have a warning message "multiple types selected"
Not sure it's a bug.
Steve confirmed it is more a limitation of having multiple file types in the database to add metadata to. Different files need different parsers to inject the data and also, different files support differing metadata.
It's recommended to convert all AIF media to modern BWAV if possible as AIF is not the best format for this work but if you cannot, you will need to sort your results by file type as you have done and select each file type and perform it in batches. Making the parser switch between formats would slow down batch processing a huge amount and for a large library it could take a looooong time to process than simply grouping the types together and doing batch operations that way.
Hope that makes sense.
Pro Tools has limited support for standard iXML chunk fields, geared solely towards what Avid calls "field recorder workflow": a way to match/expand multiple channels of original production audio in sync to any other bit of audio that contains the same metadata and timecode. Say, for example, if you have a mono MXF media clip that came from Avid Composer and originated from a single channel of a production sound, you can then match in sync all channels/mics of that original file in WAV format -- provided the metadata is still there and timecode hasn't been messed up.
To that end, Pro Tools supports reading some of the iXML fields but not all by far. iXML "Scene" and "Take" come across directly as columns named the same way in PT Workspace. iXML "Tape" comes across as "Sound Roll". You've discovered that you get some description/notes into "File Comments" fields, etc.
Pro Tools definitely isn't designed to manipulate any of that metadata -- or even to display it conveniently.
Yes, i discover that and that's why BH is far more efficient for metadata.
But sometimes it makes my workflow faster to go to the workspace, and now i'm used to use both.
I need to figure out why i have from time to time an annoying bug in BH when i transfer a lot of files, and then i will probably use only BH.
