Q: Preserve ID3 tags in MP3/AIF files when importing to FCS

There is a solution that involves pruning Spotlight records of the said audio files. The only catch is that it requires Spotlight indexing to be on, which may not be desirable in an Xsan environment. Another approach is to use AtomicParsley (http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/) to retrieve the tags. Either way, you will need to generate XML files that Final Cut Server can read. I would recommend using Ruby and Jim Weirich's excellent Builder gem (http://github.com/jimweirich/builder).

So, make a subscription for new audio assets, run a script that retrieves metadata from the original file and then write a setMd XML file to a Final Cut Server watch folder. There are a few things you will need to solve, such as retrieving the path of the original media. If coding is not your thing, you might consider Transmogrifier (http://transmogrifier.sourceforge.net/), which I've never tried, but does seem to solve many of these issues.

Good luck.

Mapping the tags to QuickTime annotations would not be difficult; the problem is (I believe) that it would require .mov wrappers on your files, which would probably not be desirable.

There is no question that this "feature" should be addressed as soon as possible. I would assume Apple is interested, as HTTP Live Streaming is using ID3 tags for time-based metadata.

Since your files are AIFF, try adding the Audio Metadata metadata group to your music metadata set. Then try uploading one of them. There are built-in mappings for the following fields:

Number of Beats
File Type
Key
Scale Type
Time Signature
Author
Copyright
Comments
Collection
Theme
Genre
Instruments on my UI
Instruments Subtype
Sample Rate
Bit Depth
Channels
Descriptors
Project Reference

I'm not sure how ID3-style metadata from iTunes is stored on an AIFF, but I'm curious to know if the mappings for Apple Loops added in FCSvr 1.1.1 accommodate iTune metadata on AIFF files.

The Audio Metadata fields that you mention are the contents of the Apple Loops Plus metadata group. Your post made me curious and I tagged an AIFF file in iTunes to see what would map.

The answer is not particularly much, but there are two semi-useful mappings:

Artist -> Author
Comments -> Comments

The title and track number are encoded in the filename, which, of course, also gets picked up. I guess some parsing script could map this usefully.

Anyone succeeded in extending this mapping from within Final Cut Server? I don't entirely understand if the Apple Loops metadata is an extension of the ID3 chunk or its own chunk. If it was the former, it's hard to understand why the other fields are not available.

Jamie Hodge

iTunes doesn't write to most of those Apple Loops Plus metadata fields.

Logic Pro, Soundtrack Pro, GarageBand do (for AIFF, WAV, and CAF files).

I guess the only way to do this then is to script parsing the iTunes metadata out of the iTunes Music Library.xml file and into FCSvr. Not a task for the novice, I'm afraid...

A more practical approach to get at iTunes metadata is to use Spotlight via mdls.

This was demoed at WWDC in 2008, but unfortunately the video and sample code is no longer distributed. It basically passed asset info to a Ruby on Rails program, which did an mdls query on the file and returned the results via Read XML.

Not that it is a task for a novice either, but it is reasonable to do...

The mdls demo would only be appropriate in a non-Xsan environment.

I think we can all agree that these are not ideal solutions. I encourage the original author to write a feature request at radar.apple.com. There is no technical difference between the Audio Loop metadata and the ID3 metadata in an .aif file. It is rather strange that Apple engineers would bother to demo a solution for an evident user story and then not support it when the task presented itself in the form of Apple Loops.

I developed a script recently for a large music licensing company that pulls all mp3 metadata as well as AIFF and any other mdls metadata and adds the metadata to the asset on ingest. I'd be happy to help you set it up. Its a bit more complicated than I can get into on the forums though.

Jason Perr
MacHarmony