In my research I often use audio and video archives (with interviews, lectures, documentaries, movie clips, etc) that allow for metadata (with the ID3 format for instance).
Before switching to a Mac the program I used instead of DevonThink was a program called WhereIsIt (whereisit-soft.com/). Granted, these are programs that have different purposes. The indexing engine in WhereIsIt was less powerful and I find that DevonThink does better some of the things that were most important for me.
However, one of the things that I really miss is to be able to take advantage of the metadata that is already in the multimedia files that I use.
I think it would be technically very simple for DevonThink to index the contents of ID3 tags and similar metadata formats and that little change would make this app so much more powerful.
What do you think?
JM
thank you for the suggestion ! Could you please send an example to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com? Then I’ll check if there’s a way to easily do this, thanks in advance.
In case anyone is interested in being able to search DT for song lyrics, here is a solution. It is based on DT being able to search comment tags in files, not to be confused with spotlight comment tags which are different.
- install Mediahuman LyricsFinder, which searches for lyrics online and embeds an ID3 lyrics tag within music files
- run it on your music library (backup first)
- install Kid3 Tag Editor, which allows you to edit embedded ID3 tags.
- copy the lyrics tag field text for each song to the comment tag field
- index or add files to DT, and lyric results will appear in searches
Note: I used the Kid3 GUI rather than the command line, and used a manual copy/paste rather than scripted, because of limitations with how line breaks in lyric text is handled by the app. In theory it should be possible to automate the tag copying, either fully scripted or exporting to/from csv, however I spent several hours trying both the GUI and the command line.
1 Like