Digibase Comments Column Importing...

[Nexxt]

Years ago we began cataloging all of our SFX cds into a Filemaker Pro database with a special, searchable "sounds like" field to extend the description and help us find sounds more quickly.

Can you see where this is going. H E L P ! ! ! (Found nothing in Answerbase or DUC.)

Is there any way to import all of these descriptions into the searchable "comments" field in the workspace browser besides cutting an pasting each individual description? We can't imagine having to copy and paste nearly 10,000 SFX file descriptions to enjoy the same versatility that we now have.

TIA for any insight.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

If these are WAV files, you can have someone write you a simple program to read the comments from your database and create an ANNO chunk in the WAV RIFF file to store the comment inside the file(s). I'm sure it's similar with an AIFF or SD2 file. The AIFF format also can contain an ANNOtation chunk, and I'm sure the sd2 resource can hold one as well.

I don't know of any other method available to you to automate doing this.

The ANNO chunk is a FOURCC consisting of the characters A, N, N and O - a DWORD containing the length of the description.. then the description. The description should have an additional pad character to make it use an even byte value.

The ANNO chunk can reside after the data chunk, so adding this information should be a fast process.

Rail

[Nexxt]

Thanks, Rail.

That's a little deep for me. I'm not sure how to get it into each aiff record file, though as each is coming direct from CD.

What about creating an Applescript autobot and having it copy each SFX description field record from the corresponding total record sequentially (each disk seems to have loaded in the same squence) and then pasting that individual description into each comment box in sequence.

I've not used Applescript much, but it seems that might work.

[Scott Minor]

Nexxt, What we have done in the past is write a short applescript to do the job - as a field in the FM database. Then you can loop through all the records, setting the comments in the finder for each.

This worked fine last week in OS8. This week in OS10.3.1, not so much.

Comments set via a workstation on a shared volume don't appear on the shared volume, or to any other workstation.
Comments set on the server don't appear to the workstations, either in the finder or Digibase.

What's up with that?