Guest Post by Buyer Brown Of BBTAS.com in colaberation with Benjamin Straw
The first Commandment of podcasting is thou shalt tag your MP3 or AAC files.
A lot of podcasters have missed this fundamental thing called tagging. There is no excuse for this and every podcaster should know how to tag his or her own files.
When it comes to Podcasting and the convent podcaster file format known as mp3’s, Order is exactly what you want, but sadly a great number of your podcasting brethren fall short on this subject lets dig deeper.
Throughout history mankind has used many identifying systems for the purpose of tracking and maintaining order. Some examples are the postal services, scanning labels, social security number, and driver’s licenses.
Despite the popular belief, (From Spontaneous Chaos, Comes Order) in example (Big Bang Theory) a more proven train of thought is (From Lack of Order Comes Chaos) this is why these identifying systems play such an important role in all of our lives.
So what is (ID3 Tagging)? Simply put, it’s a system built to identify music, audiobooks, or a podcast. The (ID3 Tagging) system gives the users or listeners of these mp3 files important information about that mp3 file such as Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, to make this a bit clearer let’s put it into some practice.
- Who – (Created the mp3 file? Such as authors name)
- What – (Is the name of this mp3 file? Or the Title of this file)
- Where – (Was this created? Your city, name of your studio, or maybe the business name)
- When – (Was this mp3 file created? The date)
- Why – (Was it made – such as a small excerpt)
- How – (This could be answered along the lines of your bit rate used)
This information attached to the mp3 file of your podcast, supplies the answers to the vital questions that humans apply to every new bit of data we encounter. To be more technically correct the attached data is called metadata insert that term into your vocabulary when it comes to a technological society it will surface often. So far this has been a light covering of ID3 Tagging other bits of information can be added such as Album art file formats and sizing, programs to add your ID3 metadata and so on okay let’s dig deeper.
Tagging your MP3 With Audacity
So lets imagine that you have a finished your podcast and you save the file as an mp3 file… Its just busting at the seams with your podcast goodness and now you hear in the back of you mind (Time To Do Some ID3 Tagging) what would you do? what would you encounter? Well that depends on you because now its time to chose what program you will use to create your ID3 Tags here is one example Audacity many podcasters use Audacity to record their podcast with and then export to mp3 using the
(Lame mp3 encoder) whether you should or should not do this is not the issue at this moment but rather if you chose Audacity as your solution you will encounter this ID3 Tag window
As you can see its not listed as Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, but instead its listed
Artist Name, Track Title, Album Title, Track Number, Year, Genre, Comments. This should not throw you off but instead adapt your ingrained thinking of Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, to match up.
Artist Name: Host and if it applies co-host’s This tag in most cases will always be the same unless you give your show away and a different person is taking over your show for good.
Buyer’s opinion is if you have a guest host list their name in the Title of the episode and not on Artist Name.
Benjamin’s opinion is to put it int the Artist name, you are letting the listener know who is in the show. I do this by putting your name “Benjamin Straw” than adding “Ft. Buyer Brown”. This is how it would look like “Benjamin Straw, Ft. Buyer Brown”.
Track Title: This is the Name of the episode not the name of the show – this should be short sweet and to the point with a twist the Title of the Episode has the power to catch a new listeners eye much like the title of a book. Remember be competitive give me a reason to spend my time listening to your show.
Album Title: This is another field that will not change, its the Name of your show and should be constant. This field is very important to mp3 players such as ZUNE its used to group shows together so be nice to this tag and it will server you well.
Track Number: This is where you will put the episode number of your show – some podcasters like to put episode numbers in the title of the episode this is okay but make sure to do the same in the Track number location.
Year: Of course you know what to do here
Genre: You can put Podcasting in this field.
Comments: I save this area to list everything else like special notes, URL to the podcast page or messages to your listener.
Although alot of mp3 players dont use this field, some desktop audio players still do.
Now for the down side Audacity Doesn’t allow you to add artwork and you know its a shame you cant do everything right there.
Tagging your MP3 With MP3Tag
After that disappointment lets take a look at another MP3 tager called MP3Tag from Florian Heidenreich.
And guess what? Like Audacity it’s also free and very easy to create your tags. Their are a lot of other free and paid software that can help you tag your podcast. but this one beats all of them while almost.
MP3Tag might just be one of the best MP3 tag software on the market, but it does have its downfalls, well I wont focus on those but I will tell you the good things about MP3Tag. Let’s start out with it what all the other MP3 tag editor’s have including this one… Title, Artist, Album, Year, Track, Genre, Comment, and Album art. But the nice thing about MP3Tag is the ability to customize the editor. Not only can you customize just the essential stuff but other fields, for example you can add a custom fields like composer, disc number, etc.
but not only can you customize just the fields, how would you like to do a bulk editing, I can take an entire CD and edit a single MP3 file or all of them at the exact same time, with in the editor. You could even go as far as renaming each file with a single keystroke, sweet huh?
But with all that tagging goodness there is still some thing missing from this editor.
iTunes Does everything for you (Except goto the bathroom for you!)
On words to iTunes, the glorious iTunes, a podcaserds best friend! Not only can encode your MP3 or AAC files, but it can also type tag MP3 files in a really cool way.
I’m not saying every podcaster likes iTunes but they should, I mean the things that Apple has done for us (I mean podcasters) deserves to be recognized.
Apple has given us so many tools, Garageband, iTunes, podcast publisher, I mean the the list keeps going and going and going. Although most of these programs are for MacOS X only, Apple has added us windows people iTunes as reduction.
What I like to do after editing and mixing my WAV file and audacity is toss it into iTunes and let iTunes encode the file into an MP3 (Note: this is after changing a few settings within the preferences).
After it’s all done I right-click the MP3 file and choose “Get Info” wow I bet you’ve never seen this before! The first page you see gives you all the information you need to know about your MP3 down to how it was encoded, Just like what was said before what when where and why oh I forgot how, But its a little different( most of which you don’t need to know about or really care about!)
The next tab is called “Info”. In this tab iTunes gives you fields to put your all your tags in Name, Artist, Album Artist, Album, Grouping, Composer, Comments, Genre, Year, Track Number, Disc Number, and BPM.
For podcasting there are four fields you don’t really have any need for and dont have to worry about, those are ”Album artist, Grouping, Ddisc Number, and BPM” (I still have no clue what grouping is for!)
The naming schemes that iTunes uses is a little different from other MP3 tagging software, for example “Name and Title” are the same thing.
Also there are some extra fields that are not included in the other software, for example “Composer” or “Disc number” but don’t frat after a while you will get used to it.
The next three tabs “Video, Sorting, and Options you don’t really need to worry about, but you do need to worry about the next two Lyrics and Artwork
Lyrics is a place where you can put any text into it and when I mean anything I mean anything. You can put your show notes, e-mail address, phone number, or whatever you want.
I like to put my sponsorship of the top, followed by a little excerpt of the show, followed by an e-mail address and a phone number of my network.
I’ve seen other podcasters put jokes, entire show notes, thank you messages, even full scripts used in their podcast.
After the lyrics tag is
Artwork, which I think alot of podcasters overlook or misuse.
Although not all MP3 players show the artwork, but a lot of them do, my Blackberry did when I used it as an MP3 player and now that I have an iPod touch it also uses the artwork.
It showcases the great art of your show I mean you worked really hard on that piece of art wouldn’t you like to showcase it? I know I would.
In the next series of the 10 Commandments of podcasting were going to into the next second commandment, Mix your left and right together. So stay tuned.
We would like to know how you tag your MP3 files? Leave a comment below or email Feedback@how2podcast.com
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