Adding the right tags is the key to managing your digital music collection
The shift towards digital music has brought us many benefits.
Compressed music files mean we can fit hundreds of albums on our media players. However, one often overlooked advantage is that cataloguing music libraries is now much easier.
All music players, such as Windows Media Player 11 and Apple’s iTunes, allow you to browse albums by artists, album name or song title and you can create playlists comprising a variety of music styles and artists without having to shuffle CDs or cassettes.
What’s more, intelligent playlist creation technology, such as the Genius feature recently added to iTunes, allows you to pick a track and have a playlist automatically created for you based on its style and genre.
What makes all of this possible is some clever additional data called tags that are added on to your MP3 files when they’re initially ripped from CD.
A history of id When the MP3 format was first created it didn’t include any support for tagging. MP3 was originally designed as a way of compressing audio for transmission alongside video on broadcast systems like digital satellite and cable TV.
It wasn’t until much later that people started to use MP3 as a way of compressing and storing music. However, by the mid 1990s it became obvious it would be useful if there was a way of adding text to MP3s to describe the content of the file.
Eventually a system was developed that used a 128-byte tag at the end of the file to store artist, song and title information along with a small area for other comments. The tag went at the end of the file as a compromise to retain compatibility with existing software players.
This tagging format became know as ID3 and was soon standard. Not long after its introduction, however, it was tweaked to allow it to store track numbers, to indicate the play order of the tracks on the original source CD. This extended format became known as ID3v1.1.
