Spotlight META data not working on external drive

Scripting Forums AppleScriptObjC and Xcode
#1

For some reason I’m having trouble reading metaData that does exist on an external drive.
The drive has been indexed, and I’ve recently rebuilt the index.

Using:

  1. current application’s NSMetadataQuery
  2. Shane’s Metadata Lib
  3. Finder

all fail to read one of the music files meta data

if I open the file with QTplayer 7 the meta data shows

if I copy the file to my desktop the the finder shows the meta data

any ideas on why i’m not able to read the meta data?

thanks

Kerry

#2

Your images aren’t showing up, so it’s hard to say. But what QuickTime shows as metadata is not the same thing as Spotlight metadata. Where they match, it’s the data a Spotlight filter should be importing, but appears not to be in your case.

#3

Quick question just to be clear.
Is the Finder get info window under info
Is that showing me the spotlight metadata?

I guess there’s a difference between the actual embedded
MP3 tags and the spotlight tags?

I guess spotlight will only update if the file has been modified?
Which I think some iTunes stuff is only stored in the xml and not necessarily updating the file itself?
I think this is an issue with using iTunes and others DJ software and either doesn’t
Know when information has being updated.

It’s just wierd when I boot into 10.10 Volume “Tekno”
where the music files Are located. Finder shows the info in get info.
But when booted into 10.11 Volume “Kaptin”, Finder info does not show the info meta

#4
  1. The [img] tags in the first post are paired with [/url] ones. These should of course be [/img].
  2. There are no images at the URLs used. Just messages saying “Gone”.
#5

Thanks, Nigel.

#6

If it doesn’t find its own info stored in an extended attribute/resource fork, possibly.

Spotlight involves three main players: Spotlight plug-ins, which collect information that various depending on the type of file, a daemon that uses the plug-ins to gather the metadata from files whenever they change and add it to the database, and the database itself.

The plug-ins are written by app developers, who decide what metadata to provide. There are also several things stored for every file: modification date, Finder get info comments, UTI, etc, etc. But a plug-in may, for various reasons (especially speed), only pass on a subset of what you might term a particular file format’s native metadata, available when the file is opened by some application like QuickTime or iTunes.

When all’s as it should be, the metadata will have an entry that matches the Finder’s get info description.

#7

after rebooting into each system (Volume)
it seems like the Spotlight Data got updated.

One more question I have is where the Spotlight data is stored.
I’m guessing that it’s stored on each Volume it self and not with the
the System / System Library?

I ask this as with in Tinkter Tool System I noticed something about turning off
Spotlight indexing on an external drive that is shared between two computers.
Seemed like they were suggesting that the “Spotlighting” only be done by one computer?
In my case I am using the same computer but booting into different OS’s.
The volume I was having my issues with not reading is my boot volume for OS 10.10

Should I be careful of this?

thanks

Kerry

#8

I think it’s stored only on the startup volume (/.Spotlight-V100/), but I’m not sure.