Many years ago I said publically in a blog post here on PVC: Adobe and Avid need to support iXML metadata for audio channels in the timeline.

Avid finally somewhat supports this with the ability to Display Source Track Name in Timeline in the recent release, but Adobe is still MIA with better iXML metadata support in Premiere Pro.

That’s where a new third-party extension called iXML Renamer for Premiere Pro comes to the rescue. You can name a fair price, download and then install iXML Renamer for Premiere Pro and you get a new panel that can do a lot of different things with the iXML metadata that your audio recordist was nice enough to setup during the shoot.

iXML is very useful audio metadata that can be tagged in broadcast wave audio files recorded on-set that can quite literally name each channel of audio in a .WAV file with data, such as the name of the subject speaking. You can see how handy that is if you’re working on a show with several different characters who each have their own mic being recorded into a poly WAV.

Up until now, the only real way to make use of this iXML metadata in Adobe Premiere Pro was to dig into the Metadata panel. And only then you had to twirl down a bunch of arrows. Where this metadata would be most useful, is in the timeline.

I can’t think of any creative editing scenario where seeing the individual audio channel / mic names on the audio or multicam clips themselves would not be useful while editing.

The panel has a number of different options for how to use that metadata and get it to the clips and Multicam Source Sequences in Premiere Pro. It might take a bit of experimentation to figure out exactly what is most useful for your task. I’ve been working with the early alphas for a while, and it’s worth taking the time to learn what will be most useful. More than anything, it’s a revelation to finally be able to get this data which has long existed in broadcast wave audio files, into the timeline in a useful way.

There are some limitations that I would encourage you to review in the extension’s documentation. The biggest two I’ve found is this:

• Clips have to be selected in the Project window and not an open bin. Apparently that’s a limitation of Premeire. I’ll often go into list view in the Project panel and twirl down the arrow on my bin and select the clips there instead of opening a bin in its own tab.
• You must turn off Show Source Clip Name and Label in the timeline wrench menu. So no seeing both your custom clip label colors as the audio metadata at the same time. That’s a big limitation that you’ll have to explore for yourself. I’ll toggle this setting on and off during the edit so I can use both. This can be assigned to a keyboard shorcut.

Despite these limitations, this can still be a very useful extension.

iXML Renamer for Premiere Pro is available on Gumroad from an independent developer so I would encourage you to try it for a fair price and see how it can help you. I expect some new tools might be added to this extension in the future or perhaps completely new tools as the developer continues to make new things.

But the real question is: Why hasn’t Adobe built this functionality into Premiere Pro on its own?