ID3 tags - classic or dud?

haha

they really shouldn't be as much of a chore to update as they are

if i really was going to sit down for hours and get everything organized it would be nice if ID3 actually provided what i need, i.e. a tracklist field for mixes, which is mostly what i listen to these days

metadata sounds so great in theory...

You could just put tracklist in the Comments

the comments are the most useless bit!

Comments are handy for creating auto playlists. I put the tracklisting for mixes into the lyrics field, that way you can see it while the song's playing on your ipod.

yeah i put tracklists for mixes and liner notes or whatever in the comments field, shame i can't see that field on my zen to my knowledge, anyway i only listen to the zen in my car so i couldn't read that stuff.

Oh my god, I wish these were all so much easier and locked down!

at the moment, DUD!

The next-gen tags should have discographical info for nerds like me.

The Various Artists thing get a special DUD rating from me!

ID3 tags are a pain but once you've got a system it's not too bad. I use Tag&Rename for all my work - very easy to pull things out of file names or take tags from the file name, copy one piece to another, etc.

I hate compilations scattering my artists willy-nilly so I change the artist to "Compilations" or whatever and put the artist name in the title. It has it's trade-offs but it works great for my purposes.

And I, too, use the Comment field to keep track of source information or any other notes I might want to check. I don't have an iPod but the Lyric field seems like it'd serve a similar purpose since you can view that.

classic when other people fill them in

these things are driving me crazy

"various" vs "Various" vs "VA" vs "V/A" vs listing you know, the actual artists in the "artist" field - i have time to kill this week and i have SO MUCH MUSIC (actually probably pathetically little next to many people here) that it is very easy to totally forget what's what and what's there, and what's not there.

i have tried, and failed, at the artwork thing. somebody told me recently that google's coming out with an image search technology where you send an image to google, and the search engine tells you what or who it's a picture of. even if you just had a program that could compare images to each other (i.e. the top 20 image hits on google's existing image search) and make a judgement about the consensus cover for "the best of fad gadget" and then add it to your mp3s it would be miles better than what's available now.

the model is becoming untenable

are you using a musicbrainz tagger? mine just fill in i don't even know what does it

some of those Mutantsounds compilations have crazy messed up tags, I had to completely redo one the other day.

I enter all my compilations with Artist Name in the proper field, that way I can see all my existing comp tracks under one band name. But it can be very time consuming to retag.

this is where i'm an ocd viking

recently ripped my collection and it was maddening, for all the advantages of anyone being able to submit to CDDB, the drawbacks are legion

- just about every single multi-disc set I have is tagged with different titles and needs to be reedited.
- outright errors where every single track has been mistagged or mislabeled
- the Classical format for ID3 tags does not play well in a library with non-Classical music tags, so everything needs to be reformatted

for an archive which has become _the_ standard way that people tag & organize their music, it's pretty maddening how ramshackle and unreliable it is. I know many CDs which have no track titles which have been given titles by one random user which have become the defacto track names on every global playlist

what i really want is a field for Record Label - it makes the most sense for house and techno - but since it doesn't actually exist there's no tagger program that will do it

TS: featured artist in the song title or with the main artist credit

oh I hate being forced to put a featured artist in the song title but it's the only way

the only other option is to tag any album which has more than one 'artist' as a compilation and check 'Group Compilations While Browsing' under Preferences

are there any ID3 tag editors that let you;
1. Captialise all (but ignoring any all upper case words e.g. 'DJ')
2. Find and Replace on multiple files
?

this is where i'm an ocd viking

-- mookieproof, Thursday, January 3, 2008 3:32 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

ILE is one of the only three message boards in existance not to have a screaming match over the "that's where I'm a viking."

blueski - Tag&Rename will do this for you, you can set up a list of words not to capitalize.

Album art is dead simple to find - use either rateyourmusic.com or Google Image search. Save As, embed in your mp3 and away you go.

Y'all are moaners you know. Tagging isn't so bad, though as pointed out it does help to be OCD.

Google Image Search for more than 3000 individual tracks? No thanks.

Featured artist goes with song title

sometimes i do not include the featured artist at all!!!!

next dilemma: M.I.A. or MIA?

last.fm ruined my life

you freak

guardian style for all initals is to eliminate the periods, which i think is a pretty good policy, i.e. FBI, CIA

of course, if you consider MIA to be an acronym - i.e. said as a word - then guardian style says to capitalise the first letter and lowercase the rest, i.e. Nasa

are there any ID3 tag editors that let you;
1. Captialise all (but ignoring any all upper case words e.g. 'DJ')
2. Find and Replace on multiple files
?

good question

Google Image Search for more than 3000 individual tracks? No thanks.

most media players will pull and embed album art for you I believe, Media Monkey uses Amazon (so-so), the old Musicmatch super-tagging for multiple tracks at the same time was the best and it used AllMusic for art and tagging info until Yahoo bought it and killed it.

temendoid i am talking about individual tracks, many of which never appeared on an album, or which appeared on many albums

amazon doesn't have a whole lot of info on say "control" by anouschka et les prives

not a whole lot of charlie feathers album covers either

yeah that's what I mean it's mostly a function of the database your app uses to find that info. iirc Itunes, which I dislike otherwise, has a pretty good engine(thanks to deep pockets) for finding that kind of stuff compared to say, Mediamonkey which uses Amazon for mp3 tagging(which on second thought sucks cause they look at the first mp3 you've selected and look for the album related to it, you'd have a hell of a time with a bunch of loose mp3s) and freedb or something like that for cd lookup. Both are inadequate but I'm looking for a good standalone tagger to pick up the slack. Most use musicbrainz which isn't too hot.

I'm trying this lightweight java hoonja-doonja for grabbing art for my 8000 files. Doesn't use ID3 though, just saves art to folder, so am using mp3tag to fix that. It's taking a while.

oh you want a link do ya, fine: http://www.toiletduck.me.uk/artgrabber.html

can't see the point of embedding artwork personally, but then there's only four fields i really care about.

I use a zen microphoto that doesn't even let you see photos while you play music! i still reserve the right to be a completist nerd about this stuff.

Exactly. And the artwork view on OSX on a 24" screen looks sooooo good. Not that I have OSX or a 24" screen.

All my year data is still empty. Haven't found a freeware or non-crippled shareware for fixing that.

Ok that java app is bullshit.

i input years manually using discogs ;_;

temendoid i am talking about individual tracks, many of which never appeared on an album, or which appeared on many albums

I must be missing something. What are you looking for, covers of singles or compilations? Sounds like you just need to suck it up and do the work, hit 50-100 a day and you'll be done in less than 2 months. I had to tackle the same thing for 1000 albums, it wasn't bad but it is time consuming. Glad I made the effort.

i input years manually using discogs ;_;

This is the way to go if you want any kind of accuracy and not reissue years or other nonsense. I haven't tackled this part yet, not sure if I ever will though I can see it as a useful piece of data. Still, I haven't had the urge to shuffle everything put out in 2004 lately.

a couple of years back i decided to put everything into folders by year so that set me off. 98% yeared up now but folders are back by genre now anyway.

What are you looking for, covers of singles or compilations?

ohhhhh. yeah tracer if you need covers from singles I don't think there's any shortcut.

a couple of years back i decided to put everything into folders by year so that set me off. 98% yeared up now but folders are back by genre now anyway.

Pedant alert: how do you handle singles compilations from an artist, or even various artists? Do you assign a different year to each track or simply the year of release?

year of the track's original release in it's own right (unless it's been altered in a significant way). some CDs in iTunes supply the original years before ripping but it's random.

there's tagrunner, but i don't think it works quite as well as it claims

Pedant alert: how do you handle singles compilations from an artist, or even various artists? Do you assign a different year to each track or simply the year of release?

Yeah, got to be different years for each track. I even take this approach with regular albums if certain tracks had been released earlier (usually on a single) than the album itself.

Pedant alert: how do you handle singles compilations from an artist, or even various artists? Do you assign a different year to each track or simply the year of release?

Always different years for each track.

The biggest problem I had for tagging has been solved by Mediamonkey 3's ability to use multi-genres. For example, Sally Shapiro's now tagged as "Electronic;pop;italo disco;SWE;00" and Cannibal Holocaust's ost as "soundtrack;Ita;70".
For soundtracks, I also use the genres indicated by IMDB as Moods (multi-moods work just like genres).
All this is awfully time-consuming -I spend at least 2 hours tagging old and new stuff everyday- but it really makes my work so much easier (I work as a music advisor).

What does a music advisor do?

My job is to make selections of music (and musicians)for ads, movies and fashion shows. Guess you can also call that music supervising, but 90% of the time, I just give advices on possible directions... I usually work at the very end of the production process and have a short time to do it, so quality tagging really makes a difference...

I have over 8000 tracks on my ipod *alone* and they're all properly tagged (no album art though -- fuck that noise). I am a sad and lonely man.

What a cool job, Snowballing!

Yes, I love it. Been doing that for the last seven years, and sometimes I feel like someone with a bulimia disorder paid to eat as much food as possible....

it's times like this when i'm glad my inherent laziness tends to weigh out against my inherent OCD-ness

i mean outweigh! see, i'm not even going to contact a moderator about fixing that one.

What a cool job, Snowballing!

um

Not a good idea to GIS that word...

I used to think ID3 tags were dud, but since I entered the HELL ON EARTH that is mp4 video tagging, I've come to realise that MP3 tags are relatively quite clasic.

Course, their biggest failing is that if I want to keep a copy of a song which plays as part of its original parent album AND as part of its original parent single (or a compilation, or whatever) then I need to keep two copies of the file on my hard drive/ipod/whatever. Which quickly turns into a big waste of space, and which could've been easily avoided if ID3 tags had been set up in a way that allowed songs to have multiple entries for each field.

i installed mediamonkey earlier - liking it.

JimD is OTM about ID3 tags failings. The only current workaround is creating playlists to recreate a compilation or whatever. But the MP3 player itself could support this if designed so - the very first hard drive MP3 player, the PJB-100, had a feature where you could create a "shortcut" to a file in mutiple albums, so you only needed one copy of a song but could have it appear in mutiple "albums".

Wow, I didn't know that had been done before. But yes, that's EXACTLY what I want ipods to do! It's ridiculous that they can't. Especially when it's possible to assign more than one piece of artwork to a single mp3 (Which I think is possible, iTunes certainly appears to let you do it).

Today's bafflement: someone who set the track number of the album to XXYYZZZ where:
XX is the album number by the artist
YY is the disc number
ZZ is the track number

Therefore Loop's "Black Sun (Feedback)" on the new reissues has a track number of 030201

There's nothing wrong with ID3 Tags v2.x, instrinsicly speaking.

It's the muthafucking APPS (like iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.) that provide the shittiest tag-editing UI!
iTunes has gotten a LOT better then before, but there are still gaping issues, like the criminally small amount of space for adding info to the comments.

Also humans in general suck for providing shitty metadata in databases. But then again, we're kinda spoiled since we get that metadata for free -- so we have to pay in the form of correcting spelling mistakes or what have you.

Most importantly, it's the actual media playback devices.

I'd love to see a scrolling side window of tracks for a single dance-mix mp3, but you're gonna have to convince Apple or Microsoft to add that feature in their player. There's nothing in the ID3 tag format itself that's preventing this information from being stored.

In brief, LAY OFF THE FORMAT.

Cuss out the manufacturers. Oh, and lack of the public's proofreading skillz.

i've found MediaMonkey great for tag-editing, you can also edit the filenames from within it. plus it has neat little things like 'swap artist and title' for when the tags are the wrong way round (happens now and then).

Thank you! Yes, more ID3 Tag Studio App recommendations pleaze.. pros, cons, etc.

If only we could "fix" bad metadata, but as long as we demand free metadata, that won't happen.

I use the discogs tagging plugin for foobar2000.
Tags everything based on the info from discogs.com, gets the album art too