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Help & Additional Information October 2002 • Vol.8 Issue 10 Page(s) 129-130 in print issue |
Look Me Up Metadata: It’s What’s Inside Your MP3 Files | ||
 Many of us pore over our CD collection. We love staring at the liner notes, reading the lyrics, and looking at the musicians and the artwork on the cover. It's one of the reasons CD sales still stay strong. People love the physical properties of a CD. It offers so much more than just music. Can MP3 files deliver all that? Yes. Some MP3 files are packed with the same information a CD provides, sometimes even more. To read that information, or metadata, requires an MP3 player, PC based or portable. But unlike your CD and CD player, not all MP3s and MP3 players are created equal. How much information you can read is contingent on what's been made available within the MP3 and what your MP3 player can read. Despite developing standards, this lack of consistency continues because people create and listen to music differently.  What Is MP3 Metadata? The area within an MP3 file that provides all this CD-like information is known as the ID3 tag. The first version of the ID3 tag was physically placed at the end of the MP3 file and held such information as the song title, artist, album, and year recorded. A slight update to the tag included the song's track number on the CD. This first ID3 tag, ID3v1, had limitations. Its size was fixed and no field could be longer than 30 characters. So if you had the song "How Much is that Doggy in the Window?", the data in the song title field would read "How Much is that Doggy in the." Because it was placed at the end of the MP3 file, the ID3v1 tag was not appropriate for streaming audio. Information from an ID3v1-tagged MP3 could only be retrieved after the song streamed, not before or during.
Where's All The Metadata? In most cases, users create MP3 files by ripping (digitally recording) a track from a CD. This process creates the audio file and automatically inputs the metadata into the MP3 file. The music comes from the CD, but on the CD the metadata is all on paper or physically imprinted. There's no metadata within a pure audio CD. A CD does have a TOC (table of contents) which is the CD's list of tracks and their associated times. The TOC acts as a fingerprint to distinguish the CD. Instead of getting the data from the CD, your PC-based CD player identifies the CD from its TOC and downloads its metadata from an Internet database known as the CDDB (compact disc database). The CDDB (http://www.cddb.com) is a library of compact discs from all over the world that was created by submissions from music enthusiasts and edited by employees of Gracenote—the owners of the CDDB. To retrieve the CDDB's information, you need to use a music application that supports the CDDB's Music Recognition Service. You can find a list of all supported players by going to http://www.cddb.com/music/players.html and selecting All Windows at the top. Get The Metadata. Choose a player labeled with the ability to rip or record MP3 files. Both Windows Media Player or RealOne Player have the power to create MP3s from CDs. Place an audio CD in your CD-ROM drive. If it's a new CD and you're connected to the Internet, the player will retrieve the information from the CD. Just check the tracks you want to create as MP3s and select Record. The ID3 tags will automatically be created within each MP3 file. Each time you place an audio CD in your CD-ROM drive, your chosen player retrieves the data from the CDDB and stores the data in a cache on your hard drive. The next time you play that CD, you don't need to be connected to the Internet. Your player will access the data from its cache. The cache is not interchangeable among players. So if you insert an audio CD when you have Windows Media Player open, it will only save it to its specific cache. The RealOne player can't access it. You'll have to load RealPlayer, connect to the Internet, and insert the same CD again for it to be added to Real's cache. Data Isn't Always Perfect. A CD's TOC is not always unique and multiple CDs can look the same to your CD player. In those situations, your CD player will return a list of multiple CDs from the CDDB. Simply choose the correct CD and continue. This can happen if a CD is reprinted from a master that's not the original. The reprinting will cause the TOC to look slightly different, thus requiring you to verify the CD from a list. If you ever run across information that is wrong or if the CD is not available in the CDDB, you can correct it or upload a new CD (like one of your garage band) to the database. Try using the free player/ripper program CDex (http://www.cdex.n3.net). Before you can submit, Gracenote requires you to register with your email address just in case the company needs to contact you. Once registered, click the CDDB menu option and select Submit To Remote CDDB. Locating An MP3's Source. Up until recently, if you didn't know a certain song, you had to call a radio station and play it over the phone to see if the DJ knew it. MUSICMATCH (http://www.musicmatch.com; free basic program to $19.95), an excellent all-in-one player, ripper, CD burner and cataloging program, has a powerful feature called Super Tagging that tries to reverse look up an MP3 file and find its source via the CDDB using the filename and the length of the track. To identify those songs, highlight all the miscellaneous files (select the first and SHIFT-click the last), right-click the highlighted files, choose Super Tagging, and Lookup Tags. MUSICMATCH will conduct its lookup and offer five possible options for the given MP3 file, highlighting the one that it thinks is the best. Review the list and check on or off any selection you want to change. Choose Apply Selected Tags and click Apply. All the ID3 tag updates will be made. If your MP3 doesn't have any correct information in the ID3 tag and lacks a descriptive filename, finding its match will most likely be impossible. Edit ID3 Tags. Most recent audio player applications support both kinds of ID3 tags, but will default to ID3v2. MUSICMATCH is an extremely powerful application for editing ID3 tags. It takes advantage of many of the fields available in ID3v2 tags, such as Album Art, Lyrics, and even a field for you to rate the quality of each track. To edit a tag, right-click the track within your library and select Edit Track Tag(s). There you'll see a series of fields for you to change. Click through the tabs for Lyrics, Notes, Bios, More and you'll find more fields with data to edit. You can also edit ID3 tags within Windows Media's Media Library and RealOne's My Library. As with MUSICMATCH, right-click a tune and select Edit or Edit Clip Info respectively. If you're using RealOne and you click the Extended Clip Info button and then Entire Property Set, you'll see an absurdly long array of fields to edit. All three applications have options to edit multiple tags at once, which can be very useful if you have your Elvis music tagged as "Elvis," "Presley, Elvis" and "Elvis Presley." If you want music from all three Elvii to be categorized as the same Elvis, you'll need to choose one and stick with it. Simply hold the CTRL key and click each Elvis tune. Right-click and choose the appropriate edit option: Edit Track Tag(s) for MUSICMATCH, Edit Clip Info for RealOne, and Edit Selected Items for Windows Media. Tags Don't Translate. All three applications edit ID3v2 tags, but the tags are not fully transferable between applications. That's because it's up to the program's developers to determine the number of fields within the ID3v2 tag that the application will use. Although the ID3v2 tag is standard, its use isn't. Only the most basic fields (artist, title, album, genre, track number) translate across all applications. For example, Windows Media displays far less tag data than RealOne. Make The Choice. If you're a serious audiophile and you want lots of information for each MP3 file, you'll have to choose one application and stick with it. Don't cross applications. If you have the same music library in two different MP3 players, ID3 tag changes from one won't necessarily be updated in the other. In some cases, the only way to update the track is to remove it from the library and then add it again. The ability to update or not update tag information between MP3 libraries on different applications is completely haphazard. You may be better off picking one application and sticking with it.  by David Spark
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Windows Media Player lets you create a Windows Media file with up to a 192Kbps sampling rate. However, the highest sampling rate Media Player makes for an MP3 is an audibly poor 56Kbps. You can purchase increased MP3 support for Media Player for $10. 
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