Assholes.

1) "Fuck your metadata." There's no reason why you'd want to be able to find individual sounds, or be able to look up "parrot" and get all their parrots in your editor.

2) "but nothing useful." I've got four or five BBC libraries. They're heavily annotated and contain useful stuff.

3) "And transcode it if you want it to be useful." A lot of editors won't read metadata off a .wav. It'll read it off a .bwf, though. Same format, with the metadata header. Then esoteric and bizarre audio browsers like "iTunes" can read the metadata directly.

4) "And fuck putting it where everyone already looks." They could have just put it up on Freesound. That's what I've done with every sound effect I've generated that producers will let me. Tagged and ready to go. Where people can credit you.

5) "And shove it into a useless archival engine." https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/

This is what you do if you want people to go "ooo! The BBC is so cool!" but want to make sure that nobody but that loser Film101 guy who also reads Reddit uses "South American parrot talking and screeching" in his My Chemical Romance montage.

Know what's TRUE bullshit? If you open these in Wave Agent you can see where the metadata used to be. They left the TC headers in. They left the ownership. The things will even sync to TC - so your "parrot" clip will drop in your timeline at 00:00:28:17 (thus blowing up Avid and Final Cut) and you can see when it was recorded and by whom (British Broadcasting Corp) and they even left their unique tag on it but they stripped out anything that anybody outside their secret squirrel decoder ring database could read.