Metadata handling - Custom tags/metadata

Hiya.
Thanks for the public beta and engaging with the Traktor community again!

As for the one single feature that has been at the top of my wishlist for years, which is half bugfix (as metadata is not handled as per the container file spec in Traktor [neither for vorbis or ID3...]), half feature request for Traktor - fix your metadata handling please and do update it to what has become the standard for 10+ years!
But let me explain.

Pretty much every modern media player supports multi value metadata as well as custom metadata and many give you access to metadata value mapping as well.
All of this has been ignored for far too long, and this is a general use case with metadata.... i.e. media file handling applications need to be able to use the existing users' metadata as is, instead of forcing users to overload fields, shoe-horn multiple fields into a random single field or do other obscure/dirty/bad metadata re-formatting tricks [the old 'why don't you just write it to the comment/remixer/grouping field' "suggestion"... which imo is a bad workaround / joke... or simply having no answer to this at all... ] ).
But I'll make a thread for each as there's a few things that should be considered.... here's the second, the part about custom tags:


Traktor should be able to handle custom metadata fields!
If I as a Traktor user deem a metadata field important enough to maintain it, I should be able to see this field in my DJ application as well... here's some practical examples - I might be interested in metadata fields named: Mood, Situation, Instrumental; Instruments; TimeSignature, Keywords, or whatever... and I should be able to display ANY of them in Traktor if I want to... and these field names can not be hard coded! As everyone and their workflow and tags do naturally differ, and that's the beauty of it as well that everyones' musical landscape is slightly different (i.e. I bet you that my use of a 3 star rating is different than the next guys', or the need for a custom metadata field called energy, or 'Movement' for classical music... ).
At the moment, Traktor only has a very limited pre-defined set of metadata it can access and display, and this is not appropriate to the times, or the difference in peoples approaches to how to organize their music....
I understand writing metadata is another hat altogether, alas, this is no rocket science in 2018 either... but for a start, I would be happy just to be able to only read custom metadata & not edit from within Traktor.

Bonus point:
There is an argument that with custom-metadata features, there's also the need to offer metadata mapping capabilities (yet,m this is not rocket science in 2018 neither...), so one could query the fields as to how they are named specifically, instead of hardcoded absolute names, as there's a lot of different namings/conventions (I'm still amazed as to how disparate the audio world is in that regard...).
Some examples of different mapping conventions (that mostly align still, but there is some differences, and for the end user, it is important that their metadata is understood after all...):

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/mappings/
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Tag_Mapping
http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Tagging

Afai know NI / Traktor is using taglib, and there is in-built mappig capabilities already...:
http://taglib.org/api/classTagLib_1_1PropertyMap.html


This for me is the 2nd essential step to arrive at a successful library overhaul, decent metadata handling which as a result would enable very powerful smart-crates rules; for the later this foundation needs to be done right before we can even discuss smart-crates and more advanced library features imo.

Churs & Tschoe mit oe.
c.

 

Thank you also for this post and see my reply here:
https://www.native-instruments.com/...gs-i-e-more-than-1-genre.327465/#post-1637555

 

To elaborate on this, instead of having one search field with a dropdown to choose which metadata field to search in, I would love to be able to filter on multiple fields. Imagine being able to set a track filter on the Kontrol S5/S8/D2 like you can on the CDJ-2000NXS2 / XDJ-1000MK2 (see image below), pick from multiple fields including your own custom fields, and quickly filter your entire collection or a playlist based on those criteria. Bonus points for having a button to save those criteria as a smart playlist.

Hint: the two left display buttons on the S5/S5/D2 are unused in the browser

 

Would be grand if people interested in or caring about metadata (and the next step Traktor takes) could upvote this:
https://support.native-instruments....alue-custom-fields-value-remapping-etc-en-us-

as this is the foundation for a proper browser rewrite... and so far there is no real commitment or even signs that this is to come from NI.

Cheers.
C.

 

+1 for this thread and the other one

I ended up writing a homemade tool to create workarounds : custom metadata was pivotal for my workflow.
I'm currently using Beets (external open-source library management Software, a bit techy though: https://github.com/beetbox/beets),
Beets is great, but doesn't natively synchronise its library with Traktor's, so I created a tool to synchronise the libraries. This creates a bunch of playlists in Traktor to edit and filter my custom tags (then all playlists are automatically updated to match the tags)
Demo in this video:
Link to my tool: https://github.com/16pierre/traktorBeetsIntegration

 

Very good ideas, track filter and personal tags, very useful stuff. I didn't even use smart playlists in rekordbox, why? Because track filter - is a dynamic smart playlist

Track filter right in the controller screen is a cool idea

 

If a tag is available in a music file, it should be available in Traktor.