Steal This File Sharing Book: What They Wont Tell You About File Sharing

There’s no set way for naming music files, and many people have their own preference. As a result, you may run across several files with different names that could all contain the same song, like these:

Steve Winwood Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3 Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3 05 Steve Winwood Dear Mr Fantasy.mp3

Even more troublesome is when people misspell song titles or artist names or even make up their own name for a song when they don’t know the real song title.

To provide some standard, most music files include an ID3 tag that contains-information about the song, such as title, artist, album, release year, genre, and track number. When you play back songs that have all or part of their ID3 tags filled out, your audio player should display this information on the screen.

However, most CD burners don’t fill out the ID3 tags automatically, and many people don’t bother entering this information, so many music files will have incomplete or empty ID3 tags. Unfortunately, portable music players like the iPod and Creative Nomad sort and display the songs by their ID3 tags, not their file names. If the tags are wrong or missing, the players may not find and play the song you just downloaded.

Because bad tags cause so many problems, many audio players, such as iTunes, let you edit a song’s ID3 tag, as shown in Figure 9-9. If your audio player won’t let you edit ID3 tags, you can use a special utility program instead, some of which can identify songs and fill out their tags automatically as long as you’re connected to the Internet. Others let you enter the tag information manually.

Figure 9-9: Many audio players let you edit the ID3 tag of a music file.

Once you’ve filled out the tags, most tag programs will then rename the files using whatever naming scheme you like. Here are some of the more popular ID3 tag utilities:

ID3-TagIT http://www.id3-tagit.de

MediaMonkey http://www.mediamonkey.com

Mp3 Tag Tools http://www.georgedillon.com/web/freeware/mp3tagtools.shtml

Tag&Rename http://www.softpointer.com

TagScanner http://xdev.narod.ru/index_e.htm

ID3 tags are designed strictly for popular music, which can cause problems for traders of operas and classical music. For instance, if you list Puccini as the artist and Tosca as the opera, there’s no place to add the conductor or any of the singers. Without the artist, singers, or symphony, there’s little way to differentiate between several recordings of the same piece. The solution? There isn’t one. However, ID3 tags contain an area reserved for comments, which can be useful for storing this additional information.