Aja on 12/5/2009 at 00:32
I bought a field recorder a few months ago and since then I've made dozens of recordings of various things, and I need a good way to sort them. Right now I have them in folders corresponding to the day they were recorded, but I'd like to be able to search for files according to keywords.
Is there any software that would allow me to tag individual files with keywords (i.e. "nature", "music", etc) and browse them accordingly?
LeatherMan on 12/5/2009 at 02:19
What about using ID3 tags and then just using any media player to sort them?
Aja on 12/5/2009 at 04:42
Does ID3 support multiple, separate tags for individual files? Some of these recordings contain multiple elements. Say I'm looking for the sound of a footstep on gravel. I'd need at least two keywords to define it.
Aja on 12/5/2009 at 05:34
No wait, the files are in flac (I need them to be lossless in case I decide to use them for music, and wave files are just too big), so ID3 is out. FLAC has its own native tagging, but it doesn't seem to support the kind of functions I want.
theBlackman on 14/5/2009 at 07:02
Realistically, you need to break them into the individual "sounds" and save them individually named.
I do a lot of music recordings, and in some cases have 4 or 5 musicians on one track, and 2 to 4 songs from each. I just edit the tracks as I want them to be (musician name only, or individual song), and I do keep them as WAV to be able to work with them.
The other option is to keep a "Notepad" or "Wordpad" sheet with the names of the sounds cataloged by track. IE. SHERWOOD FOREST (track name) catalog listing, R. Hood in tree: 9 to 30 sec, woodpecker 30 sec to 1.5 min, Jet plane at altitude, etc.
INTERSTATE 3 at the junction of US 13 (track name) catalog listing, Peterbilt Jake brake, KW at 65 MPH, and so on.
Or you could write a DBASE or EXCEL sheet to catalog them.
doctorfrog on 14/5/2009 at 22:53
I personally try to deliberately avoid this kind of complexity because it forms a dependence on a growing number of 'indespensable' 3rd party tools, each with their own paradigms, upgrade cycles, bugs, limitations, ugh.
I would probably just use the filenames, folder heirarchies, and notepad or Excel to catalog things, and have a basic plan for organizing the information to begin with, before things got out of hand.
If FLAC has a comments field, any media manager capable of reading and sorting by this field would be suitable enough on its own as long as you're not the Library of Congress. MediaMonkey, for example.
Otherwise, a generic file tagging search on Lifehacker.com turned up (
http://www.tag2find.com/).
Quote:
Will be the first public version available for free?
We plan to have always a free version for homer users.
D'OH!
Aja on 14/5/2009 at 23:23
Thanks for the replies. Splitting up the individual files would be far more trouble than it's worth, and it would double the amount of storage space needed, since I'd want to keep the original files intact as well.
But an excel sheet might work. I might just do that, unless this tag2find thing works well.
37637598 on 14/5/2009 at 23:40
You could make an html table that refers to each file and tags it with whatever you want, and as many different tags as you want. Then when you search for the files you can sort them by any of the tags...
EDIT: Down-side, you would have to use the html file to search and browse the files by the tags.
Aja on 15/5/2009 at 04:38
That's not a downside, really. I just don't know how to do it.
