Sorrentino's Notes (10/03)
MP3 Tag - A Useful Utility
by Phil Sorrentino
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
As I have said in the past,
“Utilities are usually small programs
that are intended to do a specific task or a small range of tasks.”
And I have also directed you to the SPCUG Monitor Computer Buffet, where
you can learn about various free utilities (and even find a website from
where you can download the utility). However, keep in mind that when you
download something from the internet, you could get something you were
not expecting; so be very careful. With that said, I’d like to discuss a
free utility that allows you to modify the MP3 Tag information that is
used by MP3 players like Windows Media Player or iTunes.
The reason you might want to use an MP3 Tag utility is because these
types of media players depend on the Tag information to organize the
tunes they find in your music folders. If the Tag information is not
what you expect, the tune will be put in a location that might make it
difficult for you to find. It doesn’t matter what the file name is, the
tune will be put in a sequence depending on the Tag information, only.
Is it “The Beatles”, or “Beatles”, “The Kingston Trio”, or “Kingston
Trio”? When I put all my tunes together, I found both versions of artist
names. Also, sometimes the tune comes from a compilation of artists. In
this case it probably goes into the “Various Artists” category, instead
of the “artist’s name” category.
MP3Tag is a free metadata editor that supports the MP3 audio format as
well as many other formats such as AAC, FLAC, MPC, OGG, MP4, WMA, and
others. It runs under Microsoft Windows XP and Vista (and probably
Windows 7). MP3Tag allows the user to modify the ID3 tag data that is
created along with the MP3 file when a tune is initially created, or
ripped from a CD. It allows information such as the title, artist,
album, track number, or other information about the audio portion of the
file to be stored in the file itself. By the way, there are many MP3
Tagging utilities available, just Google MP3 Tag and you’ll see all the
possibilities.
This may be too much detail, but there are two unrelated versions of
ID3: ID3v1 and ID3v2. (If this is too much detail, skip this paragraph
entirely.) ID3v1 was the original attempt at capturing data about the
tune. ID3v2 followed shortly after and is very different from the v1
version. ID3v2 is fairly complex, but suffice it to say that it includes
all of the pertinent information, and then some, relating to the
specific tune. ID3v2 has been modified and improved over the past few
years and is currently at ID3v2.4. For those of you who asked “What the
heck is metadata?, here is a brief discussion that comes from Wikipedia.
Metadata (or sometimes metainformation) is “data about other data”, of
any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual
datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple
content items and hierarchical levels. In data processing, metadata
provides information about, or documentation of, other data managed
within an application or environment. This commonly defines the
structure or schema of the primary data. For example, metadata would
document data about data elements or attributes, (name, size, data type,
etc.) and data about records or data structures (length, fields,
columns, etc.) and data about data (where it is located, how it is
associated, ownership, etc.). Metadata may include descriptive
information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics
of the data. And there you have a description of metadata.
MP3Tag is very easy to use. First, I have created a folder called
“FixThese” in my “MP3Music” folder, where I put any tunes that I think
need to have their ID3 tags modified. Then I setup MP3Tag to use this
folder. This way, I do my work in a specific folder so I don’t upset
anything in the folders that contain all my music. Also, it is easier to
work with a folder that has a handful of files rather than thousands of
tune files. (The folder to be used is setup by clicking “File” and then
selecting “Change Directory”, then navigating to the directory of your
choice, “D:\MP3Music\FixThese” in this case.)
The MP3Tag window has two panes. The right-hand pane shows the files in
the designated folder. The left-hand pane shows each of the specific ID3
data items that can be modified. (By the way, default values can be
setup for each of these items, but I have left the default to “keep”, so
that I preserve the values when a tune is selected. These default values
can be setup in the Tools-Options-Tag Panel window.) When you select a
tune in the right-hand pane, the appropriate values show up in the ID3
tag items on the left. Once the tune selection is made, the values on
the left can be changed to your desired values. In the example shown
above, the tune “Ventures – Hawaii Five-O.mp3” has been selected. The
Title is “Hawaii Five-O – The Ventures” which is the file name. The
title of the tune should be only “Hawaii Five-O”, so I would change the
title to be such. The Artist: name is “Various – Adult” which I would
want to change to “Ventures”, or possibly “The Ventures” if that is how
you are referring to this artist. Other information such as Album, Year,
and Track may be correct as indicated and will probably be left alone.
Genre is an item that is not as well defined as the other tags and
therefore I have found it to be less useful. Genre has some general
meaning but the meanings may vary a lot from person to person. There are
some fairly specific meanings for genre such as “Rock & Roll”,
“Country”, “Classical”, but many other meanings are in the grey areas
such as “Popular” and “Easy Listening”. If you want to employ this tag
to any degree of usefulness, you’ll have to make your own definitions
and then categorize all your tunes according to these definitions.
Otherwise, you’ll get whatever the recording studio used for their
definitions of genres. After you are satisfied with the changes you have
made, click “File” and then select “Save tag” or just click on the icon
that looks like a floppy disk, to save the tag information with the
tune.
MP3Tag is a useful utility if you are accumulating a large music
collection and you have some specific ideas about how you would like the
tunes to be organized. MP3Tag has a lot of additional features. I have
described the ones that, I feel, are basic to organizing a music collection.
Music collections have a way of growing in all directions and using an MP3
Tag utility is a way of controlling that growth.
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Copyright 2010. This article is from the March 2010 issue of the
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