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IT Section--Nov. 2007--Message from the Prez.
As the president of CLA's IT section, I will be posting monthly messages in order to communicate more frequently with all members of CLA. This month I would like to talk about ID3 tags and my favorite programs for correcting and changing them. If you have alternatives to share, please do!
If you like to carry your music, audiobooks, or podcasts on a portable media player (iPOD, Zune, or others), you may have experienced problems with your ID3 tags. If they are not correct, you will hear songs in the wrong order or they will be categorized in genres that don't suit you. But you can change them.
ID3 tags are metadata containers, designed with MP3 files in mind, to hold album, artist, title, track number, and other information about the file. This little piece of data added to the file was invented in 1996 and was called ID3v1. It very quickly became the de facto standard, but not without complaints. Many people found the space too limited to put in long song titles, for example. In 1998, ID3v2 was created, expanding the field sizes to hold more of the most valuable information -- titles and album names. Many ID3 tag editors allow you to save both kinds of tags (v1 and v2) so older software and players recognize the information and display it to you.
Being a big fan of freeware, I have found a couple of free programs for editing my ID3 tags.
For a while I used Alex Buturuga's Multi ID3 Tag Editor. The interface is fairly simple so you don't have to refer to help pages. It has nice batch tagging across multiple directories. However, I'm under no illusion that it is the best free ID3 editor. Recently I have discovered TigoTago. It has a great deal of flexibility in naming and allows for automatic track renumbering, something I've had a difficult time finding in free editors. It does have a slightly greater learning curve; I've had to read the help page a couple of times to remind myself how something works. Between the two of them, I can do anything I like to correct the ID3 tags in all my MP3 files, making them easier to use on my portable media players.
If you have a terrific, free ID3 tag editor, please let me know and I will share the information.
Lisa Bartle
President, IT Section, California Libary Association
Reference Librarian, CSU San Bernardino
lbartle@csusb.edu
Posted on November 2, 2007 2:03 PM | Permalink