Maintaining a Music Library

As your digital music collection grows, file organization will become a serious issue if you neglect it. Most people will become frustrated skipping through hundreds of tracks just to find an elusive old favorite with a completely irrelevant file name. Just as with your other computer files, make sure you establish a well ordered folder system from the beginning.

You will also find that MP3 players and other devices are not suited to long filenames. For this reason, MP3 files can contain metadata, meaning "data about data", to identify them on computers and portable devices. The most widespread standard for this type of information is called ID3 (short for Identify an MP3), and this data can be appended to OGG, AAC, WMA and other files, in addition to MP3s. Some uncompressed files, such as WAVs, do not support metadata.

Adding this information to a file is called tagging, and depending on the version of the standard recognized by your software media player or audio device, this usually includes the song title, the artist name, the album the song is from, the year it was released, and the genre of music. It can also include the songwriter name (as this often differs from the artists who performed the track), copyright information, lyrics (if any), digital rights data, sound information, and even a digital image, the album artwork, for example.

Your operating system will let you view and/or edit metadata in most files (Cedi on a Mac, or right-click and select Properties in Windows), but it is easier to do this using some kind of media software, such as iTunes. Select the track you want to edit in the main window and choose File > Get Info from the top menu. A dialog box will appear with all the information on that track.

The track's Summary contains a combination of general file information, metadata saved within the file itself, and information iTunes keeps for sorting purposes, such as how often the track has been played. Clicking the Info tab allows you to edit the track information in the fields provided. Save your changes by clicking OK.

The Options tab reveals a variety of non permanent modifications you can make to the track that will only be recognized by iTunes or an iPod. These settings can be very handy if you aren't comfortable editing the audio in any permanent manner with software. The Remember Playback Position setting is useful when taking a break from a long podcast as it will help the player "remember" where you last left off.

The Lyrics and Artwork tabs can accommodate text and graphics, but not all software or media players will be able to recognize these, and you may find that certain files cannot contain this information.

As you can imagine, it can become rather tedious editing the information in every single file. It is for this reason that the Gracenote CDDB (Compact Disc Database) exists. When a CD has been inserted into the drive on your computer, media players like iTunes or Windows Media Player will attempt to access this database over the Web in order to match the data on the disc with a set of related information stored in the database. If a match is found, the information will be downloaded and applied to the CD in the drive, and if you choose to rip the songs to your hard drive, the ripping software can not only name the files, but can add appropriate metadata to them automatically.

You can also force this procedure in iTunes by choosing Advanced > Get CD Track Names. As the database is built from the efforts of music lovers around the world, you can also Submit CD Track Names if a CD you own has not been submitted yet.

To create playlists and custom compilations from your music collection, you do not have to move or copy files from their original locations on your hard drive, simply create them in iTunes or another application and let the software keep track of where they are. ITunes stores a link to each music file registered with it, and updates the link when the music file is moved or deleted. You can add one song to multiple playlists in this manner without having to actually duplicate the file.