Sorry I haven’t had anything enlightful to write lately, but I’ve been living in id3 tag hell :( Not taking the time to edit the data in in the songs when I ripped them proving to be a big pain in the butt. And the tags that are there are a mish mashed mess. Luckly its easy to edit id3 tags in iTunes. Taking the time to edit all the tags is a good thing. All my music will be well organized, with proper meta data, and have album art! Its pretty exciting to know that my mp3’s will be in order for the first time.
I’ve been manually downloading my album art from Amazon. I found a script called FetchArt that automatically finds and downloads the art for you. Unfortunately, it isn’t compatible with Intel Macs :( I’ve been told that iTunes will download album art for you through the iTunes store, but I don’t have an iTunes store account yet.
I may be the only person on the face of the planet that doesn’t have an iPod. My trusty iRiver iHP-140 has been kicking along like a champ for years. When it dies I’ll probably replace it with a video iPod, but for now it does the job. The biggest bummer about my iHP-140 is that I can’t sync it with my iTunes library. I did find an open source solution, iRiverSync 2.0. The original site is down but it can be download here. I have yet to try it yet since I’m still moving my data off my mp3 player still, but as soon as I’m finished its going to be the first thing I’m going to try. I don’t know if it will work though, since it was developed for iTunes 4.7. Maybe the iTunes leprechaun will give me a bit of luck and it’ll work.
Well, I hear the whip cracking, that must mean that its time to get back to importing music.
Oh, 1 last thing. Is it common for people to put the track number in the ‘Title” field for id3 tags? (ie. “07 Happy Birthday” in the title field instead of just “Happy Birthday”). I have the track data in the track field and also at the beginning of the file name of the actual mp3.
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My title fields all just have the name of the tracks, not the number. Since there’s a separate tag for track number, why not use that? It makes everything a lot cleaner, IMO. The file names (on the other hand) usually do have the track numbers in them.
You ask, I answer!
Thanks, thats what I thought. Some of the files that I had gotten years ago had the track data in the name field which is why I asked. Its nice that iTunes automatically adds the track data to the file name.
Be sure to verify any track info that is downloaded from the CDDB. A lot of single-artist compilations tend to be marked as “Compilations”. The Compilation tag is meant for multi-artist albums. Also, if you’re anal like me, you’ll want the original year of release for each individual track on all compilation discs. Be sure to fill in the Album Artist tag. It will help you to separate albums that have similar titles, such as Greatest Hits. There is an apple script to copy all of your current artists to the album artist field.
Yeah, I noticed that when you mark an album as a compilation iTunes puts all the files into the compilations folder. Thats kinda lame that some places don’t use the tag correctly.