About ID3 Tags and CDDB / FreeDB Databases

I have always been the kind of guy who likes to explore things on a need-to-know basis. When you are curious to know about something, you understand it better. In fact, that is how I recommend our new age education system should be like... Arouse a child's curiosity and you can make him learn anything.

The other day bacchi was ripping songs from a couple of hindi oldies discs that we have. We intended to later transfer them to our iPOD. The frustrating part was that the mp3s created all had names that did not even remotely tell us which song it was (track 1, track 2 etc.). Now, I knew vaguely that there was a way I could associate these tracks with specific names, artists, albums, genre etc. So, I fired up google and started reading...

"ID3" in ID3 tags actually is an acronym which stands for "IDentify an MP3". As is clear from the name itself, ID3 tags are specifically associated with the MP3 format files to add "textual / graphical" information to them. So, what is analogous to ID3 tags for the other new age formats? you may ask. Well, read about it yourself at -

http://www.id3.org/intro.html

ID3 is actually a container which helps add meta data like artist name, genre, album, lyrics, album art etc. to a MP3 file. Its first version was ID3v1. It suffered with limitations like it being a fixed-size 128-byte tag that resided at the end of the audio file. It could include title, artist, album, year, genre and a comment field. Also, the fact that it resided at the end of the file, made it a very unattractive proposition to be used with streaming media. After all, what was the use of being able to see the artist's name once the song was over? These limitations prompted the need to create a II version of ID3 tag, its more popular variant, ID3v2. To quote from ID3.org -

"ID3v2 is a new tagging system that lets you put enriching and relevant information about your audio files within them. In more down to earth terms, ID3v2 is a chunk of data prepended to the binary audio data. Each ID3v2 tag holds one or more smaller chunks of information, called frames. These frames can contain any kind of information and data you could think of such as title, album, performer, website, lyrics, equalizer presets, pictures etc."

(http://www.id3.org/easy.html)

The next question is how to edit ID3 tags and put all sorts of useful information in them. There are a lot of tools out there which can help you edit ID3 tags. In fact, Windows XP also allows you to edit some amount of ID3 information natively (it is an ID3 aware OS, you may say).

ID3 tags can be edited in Windows XP by bringing up a file's properties and navigating to the summary of the file. From here, under the advanced view, tags such as Artist, Album, Year, Track Number, Genre, and Title can be edited. However, XP doesn't allow the user to edit advanced parameters, such as album cover and lyrics.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3)

However, my experience told me that Windows XP was woefully inadequate to edit ID3 tag information. For most of the files, it won't even show up all the information as editable. Hence, the need to try a tool like ID3 TagIT (http://www.id3-tagit.de). The high point of this tool was its ability to batch edit the ID3 tags. This is especially handy if you have a huge MP3 collection waiting to be 'tagged'. My only grouse with this tool was that while most of the information I filled in using this tool, got updated fine in my iTunes Music Library, iTunes just refused to detect the album art I updated in the ID3 tags using this tool. Now, whether it was iTunes playing the spoilsport or whether it was the Tag editor at fault, I could never diagnose for sure. But, being stuck up with iTunes to transfer my MP3 to our iPOD, I ended up using the Tag editor built into iTunes to edit the tags. iTunes has a very easy way to edit the ID3 tag information. You can read more about this at the following CNet site -

http://www.cnet.com/4520-7899_1-6306475-1.html?tag=more

Also, read about how to get the ID3 album art to display on your iPOD screen at -

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300262

The most critical thing about the latter is that you must update the album art info in the mp3s BEFORE you transfer them to your iPOD.

To enjoy this feature, just make sure the "Display album artwork on your iPod" preference is selected in iTunes before you update your iPod.

In case you had enough of these ID3 tags, lemme tell you, very briefly, about a quick way of getting these tags updated automatically when you are ripping tracks from a CD and converting them into the MP3 format - "online CD databases like Gracenote's CDDB database and the open source project, FreeDB." Most of the CD ripper applications (incl. Apple's own iTunes) are linked to either one of these databases to automatically get the tag information about the tracks in the CD.

To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculates a nearly unique disc ID and then queries the database. If the disc is in the database, the client is able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, tracklist and some additional information.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDB)



Gracenote's CDDB database is a database which started off as users submitting tag information to a shared online database, now dubbed as CDDB1 (by Gracenote). While submission to this database is still (obviously) free (though the final inclusion is now monitored by Gracenote), application developers have to pay some fee to link to this database. Being in existence for a much longer time, it has far more information than its cousins like the open source project FreeDB (www.freedb.org) OR Musicbrainz (www.musicbrainz.org). Apple's iTunes links to the the Gracenote CDDB (or more accurately, CDDB2) database to get access to the track related information about the CDs you 'import' (Apple does not call it ripping) using it. Read all about importing files from CDs using iTunes at -

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_have_itunes_rip_cds_into_mp3_format.html

and

http://www.apple.com/itunes/hottips/

I am still too lazy to go about reorganizing my entire music collection (it fills up GBs of space on my hard drive) with the right ID3 tags. But, I now know how to get my little software toolkit to do that automatically for me the next time I choose to rip a song to my hard drive.