Recording - August 2019 - 55

AUGUST 2019
TAXI Road Rally 2018

Make Your Music Easy to Use With Metadata and Stems
Part One

Moderated by Michael Laskow
PANELISTS:
Karl Richter, Steve Barden, Tim Bern
Karl Richter is founder of Level Two Music, an
Australian music supervision company with
offices in Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland.
Level Two's commercial work spans the globe
including on-airs in Singapore, Turkey, Asia,
Pacific, South America, USA, UK, and Europe for
brands such as Corona, Heineken, Vodafone, Virgin, Toyota, and Orange. While working as a
music supervisor Karl founded DISCO, a music
file sharing and workflow platform built specifically for the music industry. In beta for just over a
year, DISCO now manages 8 million files for publishers, record labels, managers, artists, and
music supervisors across five continents including Warp, Secretly Group, RocNation, Fox Sports,
Concord, and Sony Interactive.
Steve Barden is a production music composer
for film and television. His music can be heard on
television somewhere in the world on a daily
basis. His music has aired on ABC, CBS, NBC,
FOX, and dozens of leading cable channels. He's
also scored several animated television series for
Saban Entertainment, and recently joined composer Kevin Kiner in writing cues for Season 4 of
Jane the Virgin, airing on the CW network. Steve is
also the author of the book, Writing Production
Music for TV - The Road to Success, available from
Hal Leonard.
Tim Bern started his music industry career in his
teens as a jazz saxophonist and music teacher in
New Zealand. A taste for international travel
drew him toward Tour Management and eventually artist management, winning a few NZ Music
Awards along the way (two Best Rock Albums for
The Checks). After a number of years bouncing
between New York and London he joined Level
Two Music to run the Auckland office and focus
on building ad agency sync relationships. In 2016

Tim moved to Los
Angeles to launch
DISCO (a cloud music
software platform
developed by Level
Two Music) across the
North American
music industry, and
here we are today.
Thank you for being
here and doing this,
gentlemen!

Panelists (left to right) Steve Barden, Karl Richter, and Tim Bern are joined on stage for a quick
post-panel shot with TAXI's Michael Laskow.

I firmly believe that
there are two secrets to success in the music
industry.
1) Making the right kind of music
2) Making it easy for people to work with you.

Bill Gates calls that ease of use, or ease of working
together, "frictionless," obviously meaning, no friction... the wheels turn smoothly! Let's see if we can
help our audience members learn how to do that
today!
Tim, can you please explain what metadata is, and
why it's so importan t.
Tim: Certainly. We are asked every day, "What is
metadata and how am I supposed to use it?" The
most basic idea is that it is information that travels with the files as you send them. So you've got
an audio file-and there are different types of
files like WAV, AIFF, MP3-some of them carry
major data and others don't. So just to show you
really simply-you are all familiar with the old
iTunes here (on the screen in the ballroom during
the panel)-if I open up the info on the particular track and we look at the file... Can you all see
the screen clearly enough? This is a WAV file. So
all of these fields are what we would refer to as
metadata, and it's all the specific information that
you might want to say about the track so that it
travels with it.

If I send this file to somebody else across the
internet or on a CD and they pull it on to their
computer, if they open it up on a system like
iTunes or DISCO or Meta, then all of those systems understand that the title field is the title, the
artist field is the artist, and the album field is the
album. And it's the same across every different
metadata reading system or writing system. Now,
the issue with WAV files is that they don't carry
any metadata. So right now I can put in some
information here and it's going to look like I've
added metadata. So I've added this metadata in
iTunes to the file, but if I drag this... Am I getting
too deep right now (he asks the audience in the
ballroom)? But if I dragged this across to Meta,
which is another metadata reading platform, it's
only showing me the file name. It's not showing
me the title or any of these other fields. If I come
back over here, this is an AIFF. AIFF is also a lossless file type, which means it's not compressed.
It's a big file. MP3s are small, they have been compressed, which means a lot of the actual
information has been stripped out of them.
MP3s are just less quality, and you can hear it
normally if you put on a low quality MP3. But
AIFF is high res, just like a WAV file is, but the
beautiful thing is that it carries metadata. Now,
see over here (on the screen), I've just dragged it
across and all these fields are full, which means
that the metadata traveled with this track
Continued on page 56
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