This dataset collects seismic event waveforms metadata and is part of INSTANCE. INSTANCE is a data collection of more than 1.3 million seismic waveforms originating from a selection of about 54,000 earthquakes occurred since 2005 in Italy and surrounding regions and seismic noise recordings randomly extracted from event free time windows of the continuous waveforms archive. The purpose is to provide reference datasets useful to develop and test seismic data processing routines based on machine learning and deep learning frameworks. The primary source of this information is ISIDe (Italian Seismological Instrumental and Parametric Data-Base) for earthquakes and the Italian node of EIDA (http://eida.ingv.it) for seismic data. All the waveforms have been sized to a 120 s window, preprocessed and resampled at 100 Hz. For each trace we provide a large number of parameters as metadata, either derived from event information or computed from trace data. Associated metadata allow for the identification of the source, the station, the path travelled by seismic waves and assessment of the trace quality. The total size of the data collection is about 330 GB. Waveforms files are available either in counts or ground motion units in hdf5 format to facilitate fast access from commonly used machine learning frameworks. In version 2 the metadata parameter name source_mt_scalar_moment_Nm is changed.