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Things taggers do

In the previous article of the series we discussed the structure and limitations of digital music formats, and the media they’re usually stored in.

In this part we will look at the basic capabilities of tagging software such as group tagging, internet database lookup and file/folder stucture manipulation, and 10 things to watch for when choosing a tagger. This should establish a good guideline for choosing the tagger that works for you, as well as give you a clear idea on how to use any tagger efficiently.

Tag editing

The first and most basic function of a file tagger is, obviously, writing the tags. Most players can write id3 tags, but what a tagger does is edit the tag fields for whole groups of files. This way, when you want to fill in the album tag, you can select all of the files in the album and apply the name to them.

Apart from group tagging, a tagger can apply certain capitalization rules to the characters of the tag fields, discard or replace certain characters and perform a number of automatic functions -such as counting all the files in a folder and writing the number of total tracks in the file tags, or auto-filling the track numbers in a specified order-.

Capitalization and special characters is something that’s best decided and kept consistent for the whole media library, as it helps with ensuring that the same artist doesn’t end up having albums under slightly different names (such as Guns & Roses and Guns and Roses).
When selecting a tagger you may want to check which file formats it supports, and if it writes in the file’s native tag format (so if it writes wma and flac with an id3 tag, you may want to choose another tagger at least for those formats). The id3v2 version it can write is also important, and it’s best if it’s 2.4, or at least 2.3. Take the time to check the program’s preferences

Masks

A mask is an expression used to describe to the tagger which parts of the file (and folder) name correspond to which bits of information. This way taggers (and often players) can manipulate the information contained in the tags, files and folder structure.

In order to describe various tag fields, the % character is used, together with letters denoting a specific tag field. All other characters used define what separates one field from another.

So, the “%a/%y - %b/%n - %t” mask I have created in EasyTAG -picture on the left- means there’s a folder with the Artist name, in it one named Year, space, hyphen, space, Album name and in it the files, named Track number, space, hyphen, space, Title.

The specific expressions and capabilities of masks may differ greatly in different taggers. So when selecting a tagger it is good to check out what it’s expressions can do (something that should be mentioned on the software’s readme or manual, if not in the program itself). A primary requirement is that the mask must be able to contain / (or \, for windows systems) characters to signify folders, so you can modify the folder structure of your library.

Internet database lookup

Writing the file tags may be the tagger’s most basic function, but the most important one to take into account when choosing is a tagger’s lookup capabilities.

When tagging complete albums, a tagger can check music databases on the internet and try to retrieve all of the album’s information, and possibly its cover. Most databases have a way of uniquely identifying an album by the duration of its tracks. In order to do that, of course, you ‘ve got to have all the songs in the correct order. If you are also missing the track numbers of the songs, you can search manually and then put your tracks in the correct order by the tracknames.

A few big internet music databases are…

• Freedb: Uses the track lengths to determine the album. It is probably the biggest one, complete with Album, Artist and Track names and also fairly complete with Dates and Genres.
• Musicbrainz: Creates a unique album ID in order to prevent duplicate results, and that ID (as well as several others identifying artist, track etc.) can be written in the file tag, in order to be able to find the specific album again. Musicbrainz is far more ambitious than freedb in quality, but on the other hand it is much smaller, so it’s good to have freedb to fall back on.
• iTunes: The i-Tunes database has great quality covers, so it’s good if your tagger (or player) can search there.
• Amazon: It has album covers for almost anything (though often in poor quality). A lot of taggers support it.
• Allmusic: I don’t think that any tagger supports automatic searching in allmusic, but it is very complete and can be used to fill in information manually if you can’t find it anywhere else.

Often different databases will give you different results, and you might want to use more than one on each album to get all the information you need. For example, amazon.com has album covers, but the dates it has listed for the albums are usually those of the last reissue, and it also finds albums only by name. In this case, you may want to query freedb.org first, so you can check if your album is complete by its track lengths and also get the info from there, using amazon only to get the album cover.

Tags from filenames

Another method for automatically writing the file tags is using the information contained in the file and folder names. This is done by using a mask.

Retreiving information from filenames can be a powerful tool, but it has two major disadvantages:

First, in order to use it all your filenames must have the same structure. This effectively limits this feature’s usage to either sorted libraries or to single albums found to follow a specific naming pattern.

Second, the information contained in file names has the character limitations that we listed in the previous aricle, so all of your tags will end up lacking those special characters. This isn’t very important in most cases, but still some times missing a ? or () can look bad.

Due to those two limitations, getting tag information from the file names is mostly useful either when you need to get numeric values (such a date or the track numbers) and/or when the results that the database query returned are incomplete.

Tags to filenames

Apart from editing the tags of the files, a tagger can also use masks to rename the files and change their folder sturcture according to their meta-information. Using this feature you can decide on a mask to use for your whole library, giving it a consistent folder structure which you can depend on for script based manipulation or easy browsing.

Keep in mind that information written to filenames will be stripped of any special characters and so it should not be considered an exact copy of the information in the tags.

Something to look for in this feature is what the tagger does with the non-audio files when it moves the music to another folder. A nice behavior can be to delete empty folders and leave the ones with extra files behind. Automatically copying any images or other specified files to the destination folder is even nicer.

10 things to watch for when choosing a tagger

In summary of what we have mentioned, here’s a list:

1. Know your needs. There are simple features that must not be underestimated, as well as advanced ones that are not so important. You might want to read the rest of the articles in the series and decide on your own requirements and needs.
2. There should be an easy hotkey for every possible action. This is very important if you want to establish a fast, efficient workflow.
3. It should be able to edit files in directories recursively. For example, you may want to tag multiple folders with the same artist or genre name.
4. It should allow you to automatically apply capitalization rules / replace certain characters in the tag fields. It’s good to have control you have over that, so you can keep the tag fields just the way you want them.
5. It should correctly support all of the file formats you are planning to have. And by correctly we mean that it can write each filetype’s native tags, in the newest version available.
6. It should use Unicode text to write to tags. And at the same time it should be able to read query results in any other character encoding. This way you’ll be able to have names in any language.
7. Its masks should be able to represent folder structure. And maybe support a few advanced expressions, depending on whether you’re planning to use them.
8. It should be able to search internet databases both automatically and manually. Lots of databases means more results. Make sure you’ve got enough to be able to always find Dates and Cover images.
9. Check out what it does with files (ie cover images) in emptied folders. Ideally it should copy them to the new folder.
10. Open source is a good thing. Because you might want to be sure that you’ll always have access to the latest version of your preferred tagger, for free.

So ends the third article in the series on building a digital music library. The next part is about deciding on the structure of your media library and establishing a workflow for tagging your current files, or adding files to the library.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 23:13 and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.