Comments on: MP3 ID3 tag moan

By: Kato Kingdick

Kato Kingdick — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 00:31:07 +0000

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…

By: Carol

Carol — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 08:32:17 +0000

I just found new mp3 tagging software. Looks like for things discussed above, Tagging mp3 files faster. Any comments?

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 08:08:44 +0000

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.

By: Baron

Baron — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 08:01:28 +0000

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 =)

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 00:51:00 +0000

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.

By: Dane B. Don

Dane B. Don — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 07:04:44 +0000

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.

By: david

david — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 21:51:18 +0000

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.

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:38:34 +0000

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.

By: Kyree

Kyree — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 00:45:28 +0000

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.)

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 04:11:23 +0000

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…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 03:31:58 +0000

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?

By: Anna

Anna — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 02:18:28 +0000

I did enjoy your drunken ranting about respecting metadata.