Quick itunes Question…

Phil’s right in that you can’t really use smart playlists as effectively with wav’s in iTunes. As far as importing them goes you can check that your import preferences in iTunes is set to wav encoder, but if you ever import an mp3 it will be encoded to wav while not making it any better quality. i don’t think it’ll hurt the file any, but if say for instance it’s a 128k mp3 it will still be the same 128k quality even though it says wav.

Hello Jem :);
I couldn’t actually gain the information from the Article about what ‘Metadata’ Actually ‘is’;
So I ‘Hope’ that this rather Technical Information may be of some Assistance 🙂

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Although the expression “data about data” is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at design time the application contains no data. In this case the correct description would be “data about the containers of data”. Descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content. In this case, a useful description (resulting in a disambiguating neologism) would be “data about data contents” or “content about content” thus metacontent. Descriptive, Guide and the National Information Standards Organization concept of administrative metadata are all subtypes of metacontent.
Metadata (metacontent) is traditionally found in the card catalogs of libraries. As information has becoming increasingly digital, metadata is also used to describe digital data using metadata standards specific to a particular discipline. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased. For example, a webpage may include metadata specifying what language it’s written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to go for more on the subject, allowing browsers to automatically improve the experience of users.

Metadata (metacontent) is defined as data providing information about one or more aspects of the data, such as:

• Means of creation of the data
• Purpose of the data
• Time and date of creation
• Creator or author of data
• Placement on a computer network where the data was created
• Standards used
• The basic information of a piece of music

For example, a digital image may include metadata that describes how large the picture is, the color depth, the image resolution, when the image was created, and other data. A text document’s metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document.
Metadata is data. As such, metadata can be stored and managed in a database, often called a registry or repository. However, it is impossible to identify metadata just by looking at it because a user would not know when data is metadata or just data.

Jem, post: 1393 wrote: Thanks Emma, that’s comprehensive info. 😀

Jem

No Problem Jem; thank You for Appreciating it :);
Once I saw (or Imagined) that nobody took any notice of it; I thought ‘I am not doing that again’;
But; to ‘Help Just One Person’ is enough for me to Feel Grateful; so Thank You 🙂

Lol… the short version is that it’s “data about data” – so for a music file, it is the size, format, artist, date modified, bitrate, etc. etc. etc.

Jem, post: 1071 wrote: Thanks for the replies. Sorry for being a numpty but just to clarify – when I import to itunes from my download folder, I can then ‘right click’ well, two finger click on my Macbook actually, and add details including artist name, song title, genre etc. is this what’s meant by metadata and if so how come I can add it to my imported files if they are still wav?

Those fields are metadata, but it is stored in iTunes library files, rather than within the WAV file itself, which as said the WAV format cannot store. However, MP3 files are structured so that you can store a lot of metadata within them (note as Itunes deals with a variety of formats not all of its fields are stored in MP3’s either).

This means if you copy the file to another device, like an personal audio player/Ipod whatever, the metadata stored in a MP3 file can be accessed by your device, so you can search by artist/track/album, but you can’t do this with WAV as the metadata stays with the itunes library (unless of course you have an iPod and do an iTunes sync).

If you dont intend on ever copying those WAVs to a personal audio player (one that isnt an ipod/iphone) then storing the metadata in the itunes library is non big deal, as for DJ’ing only purposes most DJ software can import itunes libraries, some much better than others. Contrary to advice above, I might be wrong, as far as I can tell itunes allows you to store much the same information about a WAV as it does an MP3. So you can still use the grouping and sorting fields to do smart playlists. However, if you use traktor those fields arent available if you access the the track from within its itunes folder playlists, also note that traktor has its own library which can store metadata too, but traktor doesn’t use smart playlists yet… but i’m going on here and best leave it as it makes me 😡 Though to finish, to find out whether something is MP3 or WAV, just right click on it, do the get info and the first tab should tell you the file format, you could also show the ‘Kind’ column in the library.