GETTING STARTED With SourceAudio

This is the first in a multi-part series on metadata for online music search platforms.

In it we will go over the best features of each service, as well as tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your search metadata on each platform.

For help choosing an online search platform for your music library, see our round-up of four top providers here.

 

When it comes to intuitive, effective design, it’s hard to beat the ease-of-use of SourceAudio.

 

Besides providing a customizable front-end search engine that more than does the job for professional music hosting, SourceAudio’s graceful handling of back-end metadata is a delight as well, almost as if they want optimizing your clients’ search experience to be as easy as possible.

 

And while the structural and aesthetic layout of their site has remained largely unchanged for the last several years, SourceAudio’s industry dominance and extensive user base has given them the network to roll out an extensive range of features aimed at empowering upstart music libraries, including YouTube Content ID detection and royalty collection, broadcast monitoring, and placement opportunities via their newest SourceAudio One Program.

 

Every new SourceAudio account comes with a fully-featured 30-day free trial, with standardized pricing based on number of tracks hosted; feel free to follow along with a new account as we go if you want a full taste of what SourceAudio brings to the table.

Before we begin, we’re going to take just one minute on our soap box:

Before reading the track title, before even clicking play, music editors and supervisors looking to license your music have already begun interacting with your music metadata, whether that’s via the album art written onto mp3s on their hard drives, the associated mood, style and genre keywords bringing your track to the top of a search query, or the descriptive terms you’ve made visible online to summarize what makes your tracks and albums unique.

 

Keeping your music library polished and presentable with clean, consistent metadata is as important to the act of pitching music as the mastering of the audio itself, and is hands down the easiest way to pick out a good library from a spotty one without listening to a single track. When it comes time to license, accurate and complete publisher and writer metadata is the difference between your artists getting paid and not (or your track getting licensed at all).

 

Don’t just see metadata as a way to get a cheap leg-up on SEO, see it as the last step in making your music usable, professional, and easy to find.

Alright, that’s out of our system. Let’s dig in:

If your library at the moment is nothing more than a collection of audio files in folders on your hard drive, you’re in luck: SourceAudio offers several ways right off the bat to turn your tracks and any embedded metadata in the files into an organized repository of searchable information.

 

If you’re a couple steps ahead and already have a CSV or Excel spreadsheet of track Metadata, SourceAudio also allows the import of CSV metadata linked via Filename or SourceID (but more on that in Step 2).

 

Uploading Audio/Metadata

Either way, once logged in you’ll want to start by navigating to the Administrator Tab and selecting “Upload/Import Audio”:

By default, SourceAudio will automatically read and offer to import any metadata currently embedded in MP3s, AIFs, and to a limited extent WAVs. This may be metadata you added manually in iTunes, SoundMiner, or other ID3 editing software.

 

After uploading your first tracks, you will have the option to make corrections and/or additions to the metadata SourceAudio finds, for which you may:

a. Batch import metadata via CSV (more on this in Step 2)

b. Assign metadata uniformly for every track in this upload via “For Each…” dropdown menus (useful when uploading entire albums or playlists of tracks sharing similar metadata)

c. Edit metadata for each track by hand, by selecting tracks listed under “Edit Fields Manually”

 

If you plan on making more extensive corrections, it’s highly recommended you proceed to the next step where you will be able to download a spreadsheet of all current metadata and make edits from there.

SourceAudio also includes the option to generate high quality AIFs, MP3s and/or WAVs from the tracks you upload, giving clients an option of alternate file types at time of download. If you’d prefer to convert the files yourself, Source will automatically detect and bundle alternate file types with the same filename and store them together; you can also select your files individually for each track manually if they are named differently.

 

**Note: By default, SourceAudio automatically embeds all available ID3 Metadata to AIFs, MP3s, and to a limited extent WAVs at time of download for anyone using your site (an option listed under “Inject Metadata”). Another reason to make sure your metadata is clean and presentable!

 

Once all tracks are confirmed, click “Publish” to start the import process and release your tracks publicly. This can take quite a while depending on the number of tracks being imported, so it’s fine to close your browser while the files are being ingested and come back later. Enter your email address at this step and SourceAudio will notify you when the track processing is complete.

If this is your first time working on a database for metadata in your library, SourceAudio offers several ways to view, edit, import and export all of the information that is stored alongside your music.

RELEASE METADATA	DESCRIPTIVE METADATA	PUBLISHING METADATA
Title	Album Genre	ISRC
Filename	Album Description	ISWC
Catalog	Artist Description	Publisher 1 Company
Label	Tempo	Publisher 1 Pro Affiliation
Album	BPM	Publisher 1 CAE/IPI
Album Code	Key	Publisher 1 Ownership Share
Album Release Date	Genre	Publisher 1 Role
Album Artist	Cue type	Publisher 1 Collection Share Percentage 1
Track Number	Description	Publisher 1 Collection Share Territory 1
Artist	Moods	Writer 1 First Name
Release Date	Styles	Writer 1 Last Name
Length	Style Of	Writer 1 Company
SourceAudio ID (Generated at time of upload)	Lyrics	Writer 1 Pro Affiliation
Master ID (For Nesting Stems)	Has Vocals	Writer 1 CAE/IPI
Nesting Sort (For Nesting Stems)	Explicit	Writer 1 Ownership Share
		Writer 1 Publishing Interest
		Writer 1 Role

The last three fields of “Release Metadata”—SourceAudio ID, Master ID, and Nesting Sort—are generated at time of upload, and are useful when exporting metadata for editing offline. SourceAudio also allows the addition of Custom Fields to include any other metadata not listed above.

If your library is on the smaller side, a quick way to add and edit metadata directly is through the track view. From your SourceAudio site, and while logged in as an administrator, click “Tracks”, “Albums”, or “Artists” to view any imported tracks (alternately, you can search for tracks via the search bar):

 

 

From here, select “Details” from the Track Options dropdown next to the waveform of the track you would like to edit, then click “EDIT TRACK METADATA”:

Editing from track view lets you listen to each track as you work, but remember to click the small “Save” icon to commit any changes you make, and double check for accuracy.

For categorical adjustments to metadata, SourceAudio also offers the novel “Rules” feature under the “Manage Metadata” tab of the Admin Panel:

 

Here you can generate metadata for your tracks automatically based on rules applied to the existing data in your catalog. Metadata generated using Rules can then be reused to create new Rules in your metadata, a quick way to apply complicated dependencies (like writer/publisher/pro info) consistently across your library. (Though always be sure to double check after applying each rule to ensure there aren’t any unintended consequences!)

As your library grows and your metadata gets more complicated, you may inevitably see the benefits of getting used to working with data via spreadsheet, whether that’s with Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Google Docs, or others. Stepping into this territory, however, comes with one important caveat:

When working with music metadata, it is important to have ONE, and only One, definitive source/database for your metadata.

It’s an intuitive rule, but one that easily falls by the wayside when edits are passed around, corrections are made, files are swapped out, and long hours grow longer. Ensuring you have one consistent source of metadata—encompassing all changes, revisions, file edits, filenames, publishing information, et cetera—is the only way to make sure the right info is getting delivered to the people who need it every time.

 

It’s perfectly acceptable to use SourceAudio as your primary repository for files and metadata, and doing so is a smart way to make sure all edits made through SourceAudio’s online UI stay final. If you do go with this route, just be sure to download periodic backups of your data, saved and archived securely on your computer in the event of any data loss, as with all data you store in the Cloud.

 

If you are planning on keeping your master metadata record offline, think about how you plan to push updates to SourceAudio, and if you plan on editing using Source’s UI, how you plan on synchronizing those edits with your existing database.

 

The downloaded CSV, when opened in your spreadsheet editor of choice, will contain fields for all of the metadata listed above (and quite possibly more). You will also notice that SourceAudio IDs have now been generated for every track in your database. Be absolutely certain to keep your SourceIDs and Audio Filenames/all other metadata in sync together. The SourceAudio ID, and when absent, filenames, are used to uniquely identify tracks online for Metadata Import. Additionally, SourceAudio IDs can be used for changing filenames online, and for nesting/sorting purposes (discussed in Part 3).

 

Importing a Metadata CSV

After making changes as desired, the sheet can then be re-imported using the “Manage Metadata —> Import Data” tab of the Admin Panel:

 

At this point you will be greeted with the some options for your metadata import:

 

SourceAudio largely plays nice with spreadsheets of alternate formats, and will try to automatically match as many columns from the uploaded CSV to fields used in your library. For those that can’t be matched automatically, this page allows you to sync them up manually, create new SourceAudio fields for any new data, or deselect data columns from being imported at all.

 

As mentioned above, SourceAudio matches the imported data to your existing tracks via SourceAudio ID, and if that is deselected or isn’t available, by audio filename. When importing, you must have either a SourceID or Filename for every track with metadata you wish to update.