As my new system is getting ready for heavy burdening of the space it professes to bear, be it visuals or audio files, there was a need for classification of songs into their respective genres for easier retrieval. This lead to study on ID3 tags, finally.
What are ID3 tags?
ID3 stands for 'IDentify an MP3'. It is associated with MP3 format files to add 'textual / graphical' information. It contains metadata like name of the artist, track title, album, lyrics, year, track number and genre in the file, allowing that information to travel with the file. Here is the official Home page of ID3.
When it first came out, ID3v1, it had multiple limitations, few being, appearance of this data (tags) only at the end of the song, having 128-byte fixed size. Owing to these, there was an immediate need to come out with ID3v2 which became popular, and also was more useful.
Windows gives an option to edit these tags, but it is restricted. It allows certain fields sometimes, and many times not. So, there was a need for exclusive software to help in this front.
If any of you are thinking of adding up 'metadata' to your song's list, which goes into GBs then there are softwares that are available for simultaneous editing of multiple mp3 files. A few listed below:
STamp ID3-Tag Editor
ID3-TagIT
p.s: For all those who are interested in knowing some jargons in the field of audio editing, here is a short glossary.
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1 week ago
Comment, as Mail, from Krishnamoorthy Sir on Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:37 AM
ReplyDeleteDear Rampy
Sairam
One of the most important reasons to use ID3 Tags for your music collection is to make it iPod compatible. iPods do not use a normal file system to store the Mp3 files. All files are stored in a flat manner and only the ID3 tags are used to identify a file. That is the reason why you cannot have folders in an iPod. The most important ID3 tag fields for this purpose are
1) Artist Name
2) Album Name
3) Track Name
You can edit all of these with ID3 TagIT.
One very useful feature of these ID3 tools is to pick up ID3 tags from the file names. Have a look and you will understand.
I find adding the album cover art (wherever possible) to be very useful because of the cover flow view in iPods. Its a visually rich browsing experience.
When handling huge music collections you will also need a file renaming utility. Check out rename master.
Have a nice day!
Krishnamoorthy B