Freesound Forums
Software to organize/manage a sound Library?
Started December 21st, 2007 · 9 replies · Latest reply by rileysound 16 years, 9 months ago
Dangerous topic to get me started on. I posed a similar query about a year ago:
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1535
In that thread I was more wondering whether I could use an in-house version of Freesound itself. I've got to know the product and seems to fulfill a majority of my needs. I have since received exactly two emails directly from someone at the University but my subsequent replies solicited no response as yet.
I really wish I was a code-monkey and could develop something myself. I've searched for 'Digital Asset Management' products repeatedly and they are either dedicated to Photo collections, small stupid programs similar iTunes, or they are multi-million dollar IBM products. I'm shocked there hasnt been anything more useful and/or more down to earth.
I'm going to check out the Soundminder product you linked to Bram. My intitial look at the site seems like it might be a good fit.
Update: On second reading it looks like Soundminder has more mature support for Mac, and it is relatively Protools dependant. Can't use it. Monkey-tools appears to be ONLY Mac-based.
Belvezet: Check this link for open-source stuff.
http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=44&Itemid=156
After finding out about the price of Soundminer, i quickly abandoned the idea of organizing my sounds with it.
I found a couple of other sound archiing softwares, either they looked bad or they were mac only.
A friend told me that he is archiving his stuff with a regular audio editor (peak, soundforge, audacity) and accompanies it with a filemaker database, everything manually.
When thinking more about that idea, i checked out the audacity project file format and saw that it was plain XML with the Textmarkers you have set appearing as XML nodes. So i thought (i am neither a codemonkey unfortunately) if it was possible to import the XML in any kind of Database software like Mysql, Filemaker or even Access, you could index all your Textmarkers plus the unlimited amount of Metadata-Tags you can set in File -> Metadata Editor, it says "for MP3 Export"... But i checked, the are also saved in the XML.
So any Dataset could have
1. the Metadata Tags for general description of the sound (Time, Location, etc.pp)
2. Textmarkers to directly describe and access only parts of the sample, setting loops etc, especially useful for my sometimes 3 hours fieldrecordings...
3. Maybe the ability to read additional metadata from the wav file itself. As i have a Fostex FR2-LE there is SOME data addes the the file, like samplerate / Channels but especially the Scene / Take Information could be useful for on location sound recording people and i guess niftyer recorders add all sort of metadata to the samples.
Like i said, i dont even know how to get the audacity XML into a database but somebody here likes the idea and can give some help?
ciao
well if you are mac based then the audiofinder app is great by iced audio - love it
perhaps snapper by audio ease might help? or is that mac only?
snapper seems to be mac only and aside, it seems only to be a (very nicely) extended preview pane. I am looking more for a database kind of thing, similar to the software that freesound is running on but with the advantages of direct access to the audio files, which is the ability of directly accessing markers in any position of the audio file.
If you want a PC based database management tool you should try basehead (www.baseheadinc.com) It's very fast and only $199. It is PC only but works very well with Nuendo, soundforge and alike, there's a full demo on the site . . . check it out 