Freesound Forums

Hi there,

Long-time user, first time poster. Don't know if this is the right place to post or anything...

Maybe there are already plans to start using metadata in Freesound, but it might be really useful to have some sort of metadata editing function built in that adds the sound's description into the 'description' part of BWF metadata. Then when people download it, if they use sound library software, they can search by description. You could also put the username in 'originator' and when you download it, you can see how it was recorded in 'coding history.' Since this information is recommended to include on the upload, it could be good to keep it when downloaded.

Any thoughts? Improvements? Obstacles? Suggestions?

For more information on BWF: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/tech/tech3285.pdf
To view and edit your own BWF metadata: http://bwfmetaedit.sourceforge.net/

Adam

Hey Adam,

the files we offer for download are identical copies of the files that are uploaded. We really dislike messing with the users' uploads. Imagine a scenario where the user uploads BWF (there are plenty BWF's on freesound!) and we overwrite all the information.

We've got similar questions about mp3 and id3 tags for example, or information into oggs. We support many sound formats (ogg, mp3, flac, wav, aiff) and all of them have different metadata editing - which further complicates things...

- bram

The way I would approach it if I wanted to code something like this would be to have an abstraction representing a standard interface to the idea of metadata, which could be implemented for each format. (It’s the good old ‘interface’ programming pattern, much like the way the Linux kernel’s Virtual File System provides for the implementation and use of any type of file system through standardised functions.)

As for erasing other people’s metadata, there could always be the option of a “Do not mess with my metadata, punk!” checkbox, I guess?