Extracting audio file metadata

Thanks for your question and for noticing that I am away from my development system until October 21. Thanks as well for including the details on your item’s Attachment Metadata; very helpful.

It looks like you have two ways to access the information you want. First, you can access the original “ID3” content in the file itself. Your templates need a simple syntax adjustment to get what you need. The “id3:” portion is one of the “prefix” values that tell MLA where to look for the data. All prefix values are followed by a colon, e.g., you can try:

template:[+id3:comment+]

You can find more information about accessing ID3 values in the “Field-level Prefix Values” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab, including some tips on exploring all of the available data in your file(s).

The details you posted are from the “Image Metadata” that WordPress extracts from the file and stores in the database. You can access these values using the “meta” field-level prefix, e.g.:

template:[+meta:image_meta.comment+]

I am not sure that the “meta:” values are available during the initial upload process and I can’t test that until I return home.

I hope that gives you what you need to make some progress. If you still have trouble, you can post a link to one or more of your music files and I can investigate further when I return home. I will leave this topic unresolved for now; good luck!

I have returned home and I can give you more guidance if you need it. Please let me know what I can do to help.

It has been seven weeks since the last post in this topic. I hope the suggestions I gave helped you find a solution that works for your application.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any further questions about extracting metadata from audio files. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Hi David,

Just wanted to take a moment to thank you both for your very helpful response and for the work you’ve done on this in general. Because this project is for my own betterment I have procrastinated on it terribly… But I plan now to dive back in, hence the very delayed response. I’ll keep you posted on what I find… if I can get this to work (and even if I don’t) your plugin is a lifesaver. Thank you.

Thanks for your update. If there’s anything I can do to help, post an update here. Good luck!

Hi David,

Again, I am amazed by the generosity of your technical know how and continue to chew on how incredible this plugin is.

I just wanted to let the forum show for the record that I successfully have the foundation for mapping tags based on the ‘comment’ section of an itunes…

I feel like I am likely one of 7 people on this planet that actually “need” this function… nonetheless I want to document the (very basic, but for me it took a bit of trial and error to accomplish) steps that I took to make this happen.

To recap: the metadata of an attached audio file showed that indeed, the “comments” field was being ‘pulled’ via id3 tags… it said:

‘comment’ => ‘moody,ethereal,cello’,

David took the time to let me know that the way to “pull” this info was to use the term: template:[+id3:comment+]

So. What I did was:

Go to Settings -> Media Library Assistant
Click on the IPTC/EXIF tab
In my case I wanted the “Tags” to be populated by the “Comment” so I clicked Edit underneath “Tags” in the list of fields to the right (I could have also used Quick Edit)
In the “EXIF/Template Value” field I entered the text: template:[+id3:comment+]
I chose Exif as Priority (I don’t know if this is important)
In my case I chose “Keep” for existing text as I hoped to run this on existing files
I used a “,” delimiter, so that multiple tags would be created if I had multiple moods in my comment
I set the status to Active

This has made it such that when I upload files that have data in the comment field of my audio files, it automatically converts those into tags.

I have used the exact same uh… approach to making “Category” be populated by my “Genre” from my audio file.

So for me the ultimate end goal is to have a clickable tag cloud based on moods… I use the “comment” field to represent the moods of the track I have just recorded.

I am not 100% there yet as now I need to figure out how to (ideally) automatically create posts from these audio uploads, such that when a user clicks on a tag, it takes them to a page (archive?) of audio files of that particular tag. For example, clicking the tag “cello” would take you to all the songs I’ve recorded that use Cello. I may have to manually create posts for each of these… (any thoughts on this @dglingren ?)

Additionally I will be creating a very similar situation out of categories. In my oh so artistic way I am using the categories North East South and West as my overarching mood categories. I don’t know why I just see North as lonely and cold, East as exciting, South as mysterious and West as warm and invigorating. I’ve been using that system for years so it will be the “parent” and thus has a category rather than a tag.

So. I’m almost there. I doubt that this will help many people as I think most users have a more advanced working knowledge of wordpress than me. But in case it helps there you have it.

I’m very grateful for this plugin and am always amazed at people who take their valuable time to contribute to projects like mine without asking for a thing. THANK YOU and cheers. I hope to pay it forward myself in other ways.

Sidenote: I forgot that I need to research how to accomplish my end goal ideally using the mla_gallery shortcode… looking at now (finally)

Thanks for your generous updates with the details of your progress. You wrote:

I am not 100% there yet as now I need to figure out how to (ideally) automatically create posts from these audio uploads, such that when a user clicks on a tag, it takes them to a page (archive?) of audio files of that particular tag. For example, clicking the tag “cello” would take you to all the songs I’ve recorded that use Cello.

This is a fairly common application, and you can use MLA shortcodes to create a page with a cloud or term list that displays a gallery of matching items once a term is selected. Have a look at in the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab for the “Tag Cloud and Gallery”, “Search Form and Gallery”, “Tag Cloud Pagination Example” and “MLA Term List Examples” sections.