Mp3 Tags and Playlists

MP3 and other audio compression formats are popular because they greatly reduce the storage requirements for audio files. They make it possible for a tiny portable audio player to carry thousands of songs.

Besides the compression, MP3 has another big advantage. The MP3 format can store information about the music including the title, the artist, the album, the year, the genre and much more. This information is displayed as the song plays and can be used to organize your music collection and find songs quickly.

ID3 tags were developed back in 1996 as a way of including metadata in an MP3 file. The original specification allowed the song title, artist, album, year, comments, track number and genre to be added to the end of the file.

The original ID3 format was expanded to ID3 version 2 to allow more information to be included in the tag. Besides this extra information, ID3v2 has a number of other advantages. For one, ID3v2 is situated at the beginning of the MP3 file instead of at the end as in the original ID3. This makes it suitable for streaming - playing the file as it downloads from the Internet.

ID3v2 can display all of the data of the original ID3 format as well as extra fields for the composer, conductor, media type and copyright message. It can be expanded to almost any length to include whatever information the user desires.

It can also contain song lyrics, allowing MP3 files to be used for karaoke. Because ID3v2 supports Unicode (the near universal encoding format for world languages) lyrics and other information can be displayed in almost any language.

ID3 tags are specifically designed for the MP3 format, but other audio formats can also include metadata. Both WMA and AAC formats support metadata which has similar characteristics to ID3 tags.

Metadata can be edited manually, but if you have thousands of MP3 files that is going to be a daunting task. Thankfully, the process can be automated. Most MP3 software can download metadata from the Internet and update the tags automatically.

Another big advantage of MP3 files is the ability to organize your music collection into playlists. These are simply lists of songs to be played sequentially (or randomly), so you can build a program of songs to create a certain mood, similar to what a radio disc jockey does.

Although playlists are not specific to MP3 files (any collection of audio files can be organized in this way) most MP3 software designed for building and editing metadata also has a playlist function. This makes it easy to organize songs by genre, by year or by any other criteria.

Playlists can also be built on portable audio players. Many popular MP3 players like the Apple iPod allow you to add songs to a playlist on-the-fly.

Once your playlists are built and organized, simply load one of them into your MP3 player and the songs will play as specified. This is a great feature for organizing your favorite songs and to create musical moods for different times of the day.