Metadata handling - Multi-value tags (i.e. more than 1 genre)

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... 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 first, the part about Multi-value tags (i.e. more than 1 genre). Some details as to where Traktor is falling short or is downright buggy atm and the heart of this request:


Traktor should be able to handle multi-value metadata as per the file specifications for the header/container... eg:
This has been defined as a standard in 1999 for ID3:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#ID3v2
And has been part of the vorbis container used by .flac & audio file formats ever since its' inception, which does allow multiples declarations of the same field.
Yet - Traktor still does not display or handle these properly, and there's many a bug attached to this for each format. If these are not known to the Traktor dev team, I am happy to generate examples of bad metadata read out, string concatenation, user data being removed, etc.


This for me is an essential step to arrive at a successful library overhaul, decent metadata handling enables very powerful smart-crates; for the later this foundation needs to be done right before we can even discuss smart-crates and more advanced library features imo which will appear as a feature request in here soon too at a guess.

Churs & Tschoe mit oe.
c.

 

Hi Alec!

Thanks for kicking off this discussion and especially for the well structured separation of the topics, because that is what will allow us to prioritise one very important improvement above another very important improvement.

We would definitely appreciate being supported by you in understanding the exact scenarios, where Traktor's metadata handling does cause user data loss today, which is the first thing we should fix. You should definitely also file this as a bugs.

In this thread here we should discuss how to properly implement the extension to multi-value-metadata so that we find the sweet spot between implementation effort, user value and risk of breaking existing workflows.

 

Hallo Friedemann.
I had to dig deep to remember why your name rang a bell, and then it came back... an ancient De:Bug interview with Thaddi
Good to see you active here!

As for the suggestion thread:
Here's a few support tickets where I flagged some of these issues how/when user metadata gets altered/removed by Traktor (usually multi-value related...):
1248301
833671
2015080710002853

In essence, since Traktor still does not support multi-value metadata, the output can be rather erratic at best when ojne tries to feed it files with multi-value metadata, and I have flagged cases where Traktor removed my metadata in the above back then. But, due to other past experiences with Traktor & (bad) metadata handling going back 10+ years, I, as many others, do not allow Traktor to edit metadata anymore, and all files that Traktor touches will get overwritten afterwards in my system as it can not be trusted unfortunately.

Here's some historic forum threads (not multi value related, but somewhat related nontheless still 10 years later that there's a fundamental issue with Traktor's metadata model & moral - as one still can not decide which metadata fields Traktor is allowed to write to, and which not... slightly off topic, but it does tie into this whole 'metadata handling' discussion in my opinion):
https://www.native-instruments.com/...p3s-und-veraendert-so-deren-checksumme.73427/

All the bestest.
c.

 

There you go, a quick forum search revealed a fair few right away (I'll just keep them bundled up here, as it's all metadata related...):

Multi value metadata:
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/multi-genre-separator-support.87245/
https://www.native-instruments.com/...e-genres-and-standardized-rating-tags.271402/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/how-multiple-genre-tags-could-work.264666/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/how-multiple-genre-tags-should-work.263954/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/multiple-genre-tags.217390/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/multi-genres.196343/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/multi-genre-support.195801/#post-1180763
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/tracks-with-multiple-genres.120220/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/muti-value-tags-is-it-possible.103897/#post-639202
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/multiple-genres.91122/
https://www.native-instruments.com/...es-for-different-type-sets.69914/#post-426476

Custom Metadata
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/adding-custom-columns-in-the-browser.104872/
https://www.native-instruments.com/...-traktor-to-view-my-labels.74422/#post-456135

And a few about generally bad metadata practices, many still in place today in Traktor, even though some of these threads go back +10 years :/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/documentation-about-file-tags-needed-badly.73195/
https://www.native-instruments.com/...editing-my-id3-tags-please-also-a-bug.115804/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/traktor-overwrites-key-information.213591/
https://www.native-instruments.com/...-traktor-from-overwriting-my-mp3-tags.229271/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/traktor-pro-should-not-delete-tags.98542/
https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/resetting-manually-entered-bpms.69796/


And I'm sure there's a pile of these on the NI support portal and in ticket-form from over the last years as well, regarding the 3 metadata areas Traktor imo really needs to brush up on (i.e this all ties into the long requested library/browser re-write as well, but that even is a bigger topic since the browser/library management approach was already somewhat archaic 10 years ago.... but the more we can tackle now, the better.
Fun fact, I was just about to take the bullet and switch over to Rekordbox (as so many already have over the last few years, either to SDJ or RB)... but I'm testing their 30 day full feature trial at the moment and I am half way through, and there's many an issues as well in Rekordbox land... so seeing Traktor finally getting a new lease of life is very welcome, even moreso at this point in time for me.

c.

 

I would really really like this!

 

Would be great to see these issues mentioned resolved/added.

 

actually i would love thisone. I've been making a "SYSTEM" on my comments to get faster trough songs. It looks something like this

number (assigned as energy by mixed in key) - (time to play it like mid of the party , peak of the party) - (feeling) - (comment) ("part of the lirycs that are stucked in my head because i don't always remember the name of a song but the chorus")

6 - mid / peak - summer / freedom / nasty - songs with guitars , underground feeling . "everybody be somebody"

as you can see is not easy to use this "System" but is the best way that i found until now. If you will give the posibility to create new slots as comment 2, comment 3 and even give the posibillity to re-write the tag, i mean instead of comment 2 put energy or feeling or something like that... i think that would be perfect

 

Not sure if you have but +1 / like the first thread, otherwise your voice might not get counted...
c.

 

+1 ... i forgot about it because of the heat of writing it

 

Please NI

 

Tons of great stuff in this thread.

How about an update, NI?

 

It is absolutely unusable now...

 

^It’s not just me, then!!!

I’ve got around this using Smart Playlists (iTunes), and it’s a massive bug bear of mine that those so say Smart Folders at the top of the browser are WORSE than useless...

 

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.

 

Hi there, I recently joined the forum just to request this feature. It's so so crucial for me and for any viable music management process. Is there anything that I can do to help push this along? I have worked as business analyst to gather business requirements around software enhancements and now I do a lot of development in C#/JS and many other languages. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that we really need multi-value tagging as soon as possible.

 

I don't really think you can except trying to get a job at NI If it's really really really important to you, you could see if Mixxx https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx is an option, it's open source so you can contribute to functions you want. One of the maintainers is developing the Aoide music library: https://gitlab.com/uklotzde/aoide-rs which I believe will be able to be used standalone when it's done and will be integrated in Mixxx it does multi tags and looooot's more. You could check the zulip chat (find a link on mixxx github page) under development there should be a thread about aoide with more information.

 

Interesting - Uwe commented on my request 2 years ago that there as something in the works (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/+bug/1743699), I guess that's aiode now. Will keep an eye on this, thanks for the heads up.
Cheers.
c.

 

+1

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

(also posted this comment on https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/metadata-handling-custom-tags-metadata.327467 , sorry for the spam, just trying to share a possible solution)

 

^That's some good work there mate!

How do you (do you?) handle the Comment2/Traktor only tags? I've been trying to get ALL of my metadata to be held in the actual music file, and getting the Traktor only tags out of the library and into the music file has been a bit difficult...

 

For things like the comment or of the rating (called RANKING in Traktor's file format) of a Track, these can be found in the `collection.nml` file (XML-formatted). This could be a good place to start if you're searching for "Traktor only tags".
If you want to avoid parsing XML manually, https://github.com/wolkenarchitekt/traktor-nml-utils is very useful.

For my use cases I never had to dig deeper into Traktor's internals than `collection.nml`, there might be some extra data stored elsewhere.