Feature request: Importing/backup/archive of tracks with metadata

Question

Hi everyone,
I've found that one of the things iTunes does better than any other music player is handling and organising song information. Have you ever seen a PC user's jukebox? Thos things are a real mess, with cryptic track names ("mike mills - air - talkie walkie - 05"), artists in the album column, etc...
All of this information which describes the file itself is called "meta-data", and iTunes handles meta-data in two seperate places: the song file itself (ID3 tags in MP3s, for instance) and the iTunes library file.
You'll notice that when you drag a music file from one iTunes library to another, the meta-data stored in the file itself is preserved (artist, title, track number, etc...), while the meta-data stored in the iTunes library isn't (your rating, the play count, the last date played, etc...).
What I'm suggesting here is a feature that allows one to:
(a) make a folder / burn a disk with the song files AND a special iTunes meta-data (XML?) file, so that all meta-data is preserved,
(b) optionally delete the music files from your library after backup (i.e. archiving), and naturally,
(c) open and read backup/archive folders and disks, and allow one to reintegrate songs, playlists or the entire collection back into one's main music library.
I hope Apple is listening, because I think this feature would be really easy to implement, and would make a lot of people (especially those who keep their music spread across 2 or more computers) very happy!
I've already set up a smart playlist ("Give me 4.5 GiB of disabled (unchecked) tracks from my library, sorted by least recently added") that gives me the candidates for archival. Now, all I'm hoping for is a button that allows me to archive (move) everything to a DVD, clear some space on my PowerBook hard drive and rest assured that if I ever want to go back and retrieve a track, it'll be waiting, with the playcounts, song information and ratings all intact!
...either that or make all hard drives at least 1000 times bigger. I'm not picky.
Cheers,
- tonyboy
PowerBook G4    

Answer 1

Thank you for an idea!
I wrote a simple script to get metadata from files and offset AE clip times respectively. It is quite dirtycoded but does the job for me. Maybe someone will want to use this script, so I put it on a public accessible URL: http://zig-zag.ru/usefulshit/ae/xmp_time_shifter.jsx
My workflow is as follows:
- I separate camera footages (.mov, .jpg, etc...), and put them to folders like camera_01, camera_02 etc
- create new project in AE, new composition - named "camera_01_p1", import files from camera_01 folder to a project panel, drag'n'drop them to a compo, select "camera_01_p1" compo and run xmp_time_shifter.jsx
- I have 8 hours of footage, so I duplicate "camera_01_p1" composition, name it "camera_01_p2", delete all layers but unshifted ones, rerun time shifter script, repeat with the rest
- do the same with camera_02 (don't forget to adjust still photo layer duration before time shifting)
- export to a premiere project (yeah, thank you for this one!)
- then I open project in premiere, copy everything to a same sequence (different layers where needed)
- last thing is to sync entire video and photo layers at some known moment - it is done easily by placing marker at some time feature on different video/audio clips, and manually shifting entire layer to sync
- profit!
Since we are allready offtopic to premiere, I place some of my notes here:
- XMPFile function does not read files like "/d/path" on my windows 7, so I replaced them with "d:/"
- don't understand why, but this check - if(fname != null){ is not working. So script will fail on compositions with solid, null, etc. layers.
- I wrote simple date parser that is currently working with Nikon D3 (.jpg) and Canon 5D mk2 (.mov) but it can fail on some other models/formats.