Recording - October 2019 - 72

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Ease of use! It literally can make the difference
between a $20,000 payday, or whatever dollar
amount, or not! Just making it easy to find, easy to
use. You guys ready with some questions?
Audience Member: Thank you very much. I
really appreciate some of what you are sharing
here. It also brings up some confusion, because
you brought up a Zip file, which I thought was
great, and also portability of the MP3 and that it
does carry along the data to multiple platforms.
So let's say, for example, somebody is used to
working with WAV files instead of AIF, so it doesn't carry along that metadata. And what you have
done is you have created this MP3 for portability,
and it's got all your stuff in there. But now all of a
sudden, they say, "We want the stems." And they
do want to have a lot of sub-mixes and actual
stems. Do you go ahead and put a text file in that
Zip file with the WAV if you can't carry that
metadata?
Tim: Hmm, that's a good question. I think that if
you wanted to add just to have a little bit of information like that travels with those files, that
would be handy to do. Like, if you think it's going
to be useful to them just to have that pic file, I'd
do that. Yeah, it is hard, because WAV, all they are
going to have is the title of the WAV, which is the
nature of it. You could dump AIF, which would
have metadata. But then you'd be adding meta-

"Downloading is really hard when
you've got 150 emails as links that
you've got to download, and then
you've got to unpack every one of
those Zips and then drag those files
into your iTunes, and then you can
start listening."
-Tim Bern
data to every stem, and I'm not sure if that's
necessary. And, totally, you could info into the
title, and that's why production libraries have all
the official codes in front of the file name, which
makes everything much simpler. It's confusing,
for sure.
Audience Member: So DISCO sounds great.
How soon will it be the industry standard, and
what percentage of people are using DISCO?
Tim: Isn't it already the standard? [laughter] A
couple more weeks. [laughter] Yeah, a lot of the
music sync world is using DISCO already as far as
publishers, and the commercial world. For production libraries, we are working on other
72 RECORDING October 2019

developments that are going to be a lot better for
the production world, like an outward-facing,
searchable sort of system. As far as production
music library-land, we haven't really gone there,
so probably another year or so until that side of
the industry is onboard. But as far as commercial
music goes, it's predominantly how music is
being seen amongst supervisors and rights holders at the moment.

Audience Member: My question is, as far as
your lyrics, if you have lyrics that go beyond the
title, and you have something like if you're looking up an idiom or maxim or an expression, do
you ever use quotes? Where do we put those? Do
we put those out of the lyrics? What would be
actually in the lyrics in a different section if
there's a lot of good quotes, so to speak, or good
sayings that you might be looking for?

Audience Member: So with their metadata, I'm
thinking that we are going to be creating the
same data over and over again. Because I'm a single artist, is there any to create a metadata
template? I mean, is there an XML file that we
can just export out and reuse over and over, or
what?

Tim: I'm not sure how to answer that. I mean, a
song that doesn't have lyrics...?

Tim: Specifically with DISCO, not at the
moment. That's a conversation we are having
about just directly copying metadata, but you can
edit all of the metadata on the tracks in one go.
So for the most part, you can get the important
details done quickly, but you will still have to do
individual songs like for the lyrics and things.
Audience Member: In regard to the WAV files,
isn't the metadata saved just to the PC? Because
when I open up a window, it'll show the artist and
title and stuff. Isn't that the metadata that's saved
there?
Tim: Well, it's locally saved. Like, I can go into
iTunes and have a WAV file and add what appears
to be a lot of metadata, but it's just not going to
leave your computer. It will be there. There is
another kind of metadata that you can you can
add, like a comment to WAV, and you'd see it in
the Finder on your computer. You open the file
information, and you'll see this comment on that
WAV file, but you need to use some other editor
to actually add that, and pretty much no one in
the music industry is going to actually have that
kind of reader. It's not traveling with the WAV.
Audience Member: Right. And lastly, is it okay
to go ahead then and just start converting everything over to AIF? Because I've had some libraries
and music supervisors want WAV files-that's
what they ask for. So I've kept everything that,
unless they specifically request AIF.
Tim: We've got a lot of people converting things
to AIF. Some supervisors say to just give them
AIFs, others want WAVs. I'm not sure why they
want WAVs if they just have a meta system that
can only fit WAVs. I actually don't know technically whether that's an issue. There are definitely
edit systems that cannot accept MP3, but as far
as I know, AIF is fine. But it is really about a conversation with them and finding out.
I asked somebody that question: Why WAV over
AIF? And they said, "Because it's easier to say."
[laughter]

Audience Member: I mean, if you have, say, the
title of the song is just one phrase. But there are a
lot of good phrases...
Tim: If it's in the lyrics, it's gonna come up if
they type those words. It will appear, yeah.
Audience Member: And if there's a whole Zip
file and an MP3, and the whole Zip file has everything that you need-AIF, everything-is that
the easiest way to split the MP3 and then have a
Zip file with everything else that you basically
stated before?
Tim: You could deliver it like that. Like, this
could be the track, and then this could be the Zip
that has all of those things in it for that track. But
sometimes, if it is an instrumental, they might
want to listen to the instrumental outside of that.
But just the stems, they like all those broken out
for the most part.
Audience Member: At a high level, how would
you compare Source Audio to your product-in
terms of the music maker-side, and then the
supervisor-side-for usability?
Karl: That's a really good question. As Tim said,
we haven't yet moved into the production side of
things for which Source Audio was built. And
Source Audio is also outward-facing, so you can
just search for music just as a member of the general public, and you can also understand license
music as well. So those are things that DISCO
doesn't do yet, but when it does, it'll be much better. [laughter]
Tim: And just to add to that really fast. You
know, usually supervisors are briefing out
because they don't have time to go and search
through lots and lots of different pages to find
things. So they will say, "Please send me music,"
to a list of people, and then a direct conversation
back to them, because you are the creative mind
for that supervisor at that point. You know your
catalog best, and you send the perfect track in
response to that brief or request. So in that case,
it's a delivery thing, and DISCO is great for that.
If they need to come and search through your
library somewhere else, and that is where Source
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