Podcasting Hacks

Tag Your MP3 Files

Make sure your filename and ID3 tags are formatted properly for your listeners.

MP3 files have internal tags that store information about the title of the song, the artist, the name of the band, the genre, and more. These are called ID3 tags. Programs such as iTunes rely on these ID3 tags to navigate and categorize your music library. Ensuring that your ID3 tags are formatted properly makes life easier for your listeners, and it is simple to do.

Here are the fields that are relevant to podcasters and what those fields should contain:

Title

This should contain the name of the show, and its date in short form (mm/dd/yy) or its episode number.

Album

Put the name of your podcast here.

Artist

Put your name here.

Year

This is the year the podcast was first released.

Track

This is the episode number of the podcast, if you release by episodes.

Genre

Set this to be “Podcast.” Or if you can’t, just choose “Other.”

Comments

This item is free-form. I recommend the URL of the blog entry for this podcast, or the home page for the podcast. You should also include information about how the listener can comment on the show—either an email address or a phone number [Hack #62] .

Now that you know what the ID3 tags should contain, how do you go about setting the values? The following applications [Hack #18] allow you to set the ID3 tags of MP3 files:

iTunes

iTunes has an excellent built-in ID3 tag editor. If you store your pod-casts in iTunes before uploading, you can use the Get Info dialog and ...