MP3 ID3 tag moan
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One of my current fave mp3 blogs is 3hive which links to legal mp3s from artists websites. The selection is invariably new to me and almost all of it top quality stuff. And it’s totally above board.
Slight digression - when downloading tracks from p2p networks like Gnutella one expects a certain level of inaccuracy in the metadata, that artist names will be misspelt, tracks wrongly named and so on. This is one of the iTunes store’s selling points, that you get a consistency not only in quality but in data, and in return you get locked into a DRM system. In other words you can forage in the forest for mushrooms of varying quality for free or you can go to Tescos and get consistently quality mushrooms for a price thus locking you into the supply chain that may or may not have environmental consequences. Hmm, I quite like that analogy…
Anyway, back to 3hive. I love it and regularly download everything they post up. Unfortunately half the time the ID3 tags, the metadata that tells your mp3 player what the track is called, who it’s by, etc, is either missing or utterly useless, meaning I have to cross-reference the original filename with the link on 3hive to figure out what the song is. On the other hand, mp3 blogs that host the files on their own server (and thus potentially incurring the wrath of the BPI) have perfect metadata. Two thing occur to me. Firstly that the lables in question don’t understand mp3s and how people use them. Secondly they’re unaware of blogs such as 3hive bypassing their websites and linking directly to the music files thus taking them out of their intended context. Quite often I take the vacuum approach to these mp3s, grabbing loads of them, sticking them in iTunes and filtering out the ones I don’t like, then following up and bands that really grab me. Strikes me the band sites operate in the opposite way, expecting me to investigate the band (possibly following up a radio appearance or album/gig review) and then downloading a track, whereas in my case I’m checking out the tracks first.
Whatever, it’s quite annoying.
This is the personal blog and main internet hub-thing for Pete Ashton. What you'll find here is a seemingly random collection of stuff I want to talk about and share. 
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I did enjoy your drunken ranting about respecting metadata.
Just a thought — what if they included a link to a little text file that contained the metadata, and had the same name as the mp3 for easy reference?
The point of an ID3 tag is that it’s embedded within the mp3 itself. Your music player decodes the music and the metadata from the one mp3 file so any other files are not necessary. Like I say, it’s not the end of the world, it just bugs me…
My strategy is to save the mp3s as [Artist] - [Song title], keep them in a separate folder after I’ve added everything in a batch to iTunes, then go back and eliminate the ones that are identifiable, usually leaving me with a pretty manageable list of the non-identifiable mp3s. It’s a bit of a pain, yeah, but it works. (And it’s much easier than trying to go back to the mp3blog, since I keep up with several dozen of them.)
The problem I have is that iTunes renames the file in it’s library, turning the sometimes useful filename into untitled.mp3 or track1.mp3 so if I’ve got more than, say, three of them figuring out which is which is a pain. My current solution is to add them one by one, filling in the blanks as I go. It’s not a problem, and this is free music after all so don’t think I’m ungrateful or anything. It just surprises me that I have to do this when the technology is in place already.
I find that often the labels don’t even name the file in a recognizable manner, so you end up downloading the new Sahara Hotnights song and the file is named jh38jler.mp3. I’ve e-mailed several artists and small labels about their filenaming and metadata policies, in the hopes that these downloadable samples will work better for them.
Have you considered Tag&Rename? I came across your blog having done a Google search for just such a utility. Having now found it and being very impressed with it I thought I’d recommend it on.
Tag and Rename - potentially useful, only it’s a Windows app. Ah well.
Point is, though, it shouldn’t be necessary. But then neither should street cleaning and prisons.
Alternatively, you can keep track of artists by organising your music folder according to artist. i.e, every artist has their own folder. And you save the songs by name, stop using itunes, start using foobar and voila - no worries =)
Baron, iTunes already sorts my music by artist in folders in a lovely directory tree. The issue here is that this is done based on the ID3 tags which record lables and artists aren’t filling in properly and it’s annoying becuase, if they’re going to embrace mp3s they really should.
And to be honest with 16,000 mp3s I’m not about to manually sort the buggers. I have metadata for that.
I just found new mp3 tagging software. Looks like for things discussed above, Tagging mp3 files faster. Any comments?
Hey thanks for hipping me to 3hive!
I feel your ID3 pain. I spend just as much time fixing errant tags as I do listening to music, maybe more…