My son Christopher is thinking of creating a music database for his personal use supporting some strict requirements that other databases do not fulfil.
That prompted me to jot down some advice and a couple of starting points.
The initial requirements are simple.
Question: I am wondering if I should build my own sample management software since it seems to be quite difficult to find anything useful...
My wishes:
- Build a database of sounds and tags, categories, comments etc. for WAV files
- Manage several collections (SoundEffects, Fieldrecordings, Music, Interviews)
- Search filenames, tags etc. in certain collection or across all collections
- Copy file from original location to other location
- Export database to file (text?)
One more (advanced) feature would be:
- Read embedded Metadata, e.g. INFO and BEXT Chunks in the wave files head
Appendix B in the guidelines on Embedding Metadata in Digital Audio Files might be interesting.
But I still have to figure out how this actually looks in the file itself.
I tested writing some info into a wave file and it shows up somwhere at the beginning (looking at it in notepad++).
Answer: This should not be too hard.
I love the NoSQL concept and have some small experience using CouchDB.
That would easily do everything you need, and on a web server, as well.
Mediainfo on my mac reads metadata from a WAV file, for instance the title in this case:
/downloads/mh/sailor/ $ mediainfo *wav General Complete name : 3-26 Sailor With the Navy Blue Eyes.wav Format : Wave File size : 27.1 MiB Duration : 2mn 40s Overall bit rate mode : Constant Overall bit rate : 1 411 Kbps Track name : Sailor With the Navy Blue Eyes Audio Format : PCM Format settings, Endianness : Little Format settings, Sign : Signed Codec ID : 1 Duration : 2mn 40s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 1 411.2 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz Bit depth : 16 bits Stream size : 27.1 MiB (100%) /downloads/mh/sailor/ $ mediainfo --Version MediaInfo Command line, MediaInfoLib - v0.7.62
I use mutagen for all my music file analysis needs.
Response: Mutagen only supports id3 tags, which are not supported in WAV. The Python chunk library might be the answer.
I have to look into analysing wave chunks some more...
Here is what mediainfo tells me about my file:
Allgemein Complete name : F:\Library\_TestFiles\2014_03_20_Nora-Tammik\ZOOM0001\ZOOM0001_LR.WAV Format : Wave File size : 20,6 MiB Duration : 1min 15s Overall bit rate mode : konstant Overall bit rate : 2 309 Kbps Producer : ZOOM Handy Recorder H6 Description : sPROJECT= / sSCENE=1 / sTAKE=1 / sNOTE=nora tammik, first visit, 3 weeks old, moan, press, fart, Encoded date : 2014-04-20 14:08:39 Encoding settings : A=PCM,F=48000,W=24,M=stereo,T=ZOOM Handy Recorder H6 MS S: +1 Audio ID : 0 Format : PCM Format settings, Endianness : Little Codec ID : 1 Duration : 1min 15s Bit rate mode : konstant Bit rate : 2 304 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 Kanäle Sampling rate : 48,0 KHz Bit depth : 24 bits Stream size : 20,6 MiB (100%)
The interesting aspects are:
- I don't have to analyse anything.
- It tells me everything I want to know.
- The description contains data I entered in a program that edits the wave info chunks I want to read out.
- The file also tells me the length, size, sampling rate, bit depth, file size, path and filename.
How should I start going about this?
I guess I need to build a GUI, have a database and use some libraries handling the file readout and playback?
I'm not quite sure where to start.
The only things I have written so far are small command line tools and calculators.
But I would like to do some GUI.
Answer: Yes, the chunk library looks perfect.
I would start by working through a quick Python tutorial, followed by one of the GUI packages tutorial. Tkinter is the most global one, supported on all platforms, built into Python:
