Every song in your music collection has properties, such as title, artist, album, potentially album art. These properties are called ‘tags’.
If you want to be able to search through your music collection, or display it in a structured way, it is important to tag your songs correctly.
If you import a CD via iTunes, the songs will be tagged automatically. That is, based on the knowledge in the iTunes database, it will give your songs certain properties. In many cases this is exactly what you want, in other cases the properties may be off. Most arbitrary is the genre. While you may have a certain opinion about genres of your music (I used to order my CDs by genre), iTunes may have a different opinion. Within iTunes you can remedy this quite easily by selecting all songs of an album, getting the properties, and selecting the genre that suits you best.
In many cases, the songs will not have tags at all. The most versatile software to manage tags is Mp3tag. It is able to tag various audio formats, bulk tag (e.g. if you want to change all songs with a certain genre to a different genre), look up album art, and obtain tags from various libraries (Amazon, freedb, MusicBrainz).
What should you keep in mind when tagging music?
- Decide upfront which genres you want to have in your collection. This turns out to be extremely convenient, for instance if you only want to play music from a certain genre
- If you are into classical music, decide if you want to have the ‘artist’ as the artist, or rather the ‘composer’ as the artist. iTunes has the tendency to do either of the two at random, and that makes your music collection messy
- Decide if you want to store album art as a single file (e.g. a Jpeg) with the album, or whether you want to have the album art as a tag for each song. The latter has the advantage that you don’t have to care about filename conventions (which may be different depending on the audioplayer). Take care that the size of the album art does not become large, since it is added to the file size of each song within the album
- ID3v1.1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, MP4, WMA, APEv2 are formats (‘containers’) that are used to store tags. Usually it shouldn’t matter too much which one is used – it is kind of technical stuff; take note however that some audioplayers are unable to deal with certain formats. Check before you start tagging your entire music collection with Mp3tag
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