Doing Our Jobs..That Boring Metadata

Over the last few months, I've been working on a project archiving old analog music masters for one of the major record labels.

It's been quite revealing. I've found that unlike the studio where I was brought up, many studios and even record labels took very little care in aligning their tape machines, printing project tones and keeping complete, accurate and well organized notes on the boxes and paperwork.

I get a great many tapes with no project tones or tones way out of whack when compared to MRL reference level tapes. When they do have tones, often the frequencies are not NAB/AES or any European standard..or they are mislabeled. I get Dolby encoded tapes with no Dolby tone or worse, not even marked as being Dolby encoded. I get tapes marked mono that were recorded using a stereo head stack. Many tapes with leader cutting off the end of fades. Some with very audible bias rocks caused by poor alignments or machine maintenance. There are truncated or misspelled song titles, incorrect song times and tapes that have been stored so poorly that there is mold growing on them.

These were all firing offenses at some studios and I held the mistaken belief that not providing proper alignments, project tones and complete accurate project information with the tapes was tantamount to a capital offense for a recording engineer.

Oh how wrong I was. This was from an era when there WAS paperwork. There were boxes to write on, stick on labels, track sheets and in the later years, floppy disks with automation data.


Unfortunately, things have gotten worse, not better and though there have been some attempts to educate the creative and technical public about the issue, it's still not something that most recording schools prioritize.

Today we have ProTools, Logic, Digital Performer, Nuendo, Cubase and other applications. We have .wav, .aif, mp3 and some older file formats (SDII for example) in many different resolutions. Paperwork is no longer needed, yet most if not all of these applications leave out some boilerplate and in my opinion VERY important best practices.

There has been an attempt to make project sharing between different applications easier, yet it's far from perfect. The biggest problem is in documentation. How often have you received a project that is labeled Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, etc, without ANY qualifying information on what that track was or what alternate or selected takes should be used. I receive a group of mixes where none of them are labeled MASTER...or where two or more takes of the same song are labeled MASTER.

Most of these applications allow you to enter notes and relevant track and take information, but none of them FORCE you to do it, and few, if any allow you to export and print this information easily and in a form that is discernible by a secondary user.

Most people are lazy, or simply don't have the time to enter the information needed to fully document a project so that future generations, or even the mixer can make sense of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of bits of useful information needed to decipher what "original intent" of the artist or producer was.

These are also things that are not stressed in many of the overpriced recording schools of the day. They teach you some techniques, but real world useful information is relegated to an hour or two of afterthought during the course of a two year program.

This is growing problem that needs to be addressed before it becomes a crisis. All it takes is a little forethought and some planning.

Credit must be given to people like Charles Dye, Bob Ludwig, Maureen Droney, Eric Schilling, the P&E Wing of NARAS and others who have been working diligently to get some standards going. You can download some of these guideline documents on the P&E Wing Website. We've got to do more. Coming up with a standard that is taught to the new generation of engineers and producers is something we all need to consider...and soon.